Gourmet Candy Company reflects on benefits of outsourcing IT

Gourmet Candy Company (GCC) has outlined the benefits that outsourcing its IT to managed services provider Advantage has yielded, including reduced IT spending and improved data backup.

“I had already decided to outsource manufacturing and distribution, as my research indicated that adopting this model would benefit my business in the long-term and allow me to grow,” said Paul Hillman, owner of GCC. “If I wanted that growth to continue, however, I knew I would need the right IT infrastructure in place to support it.”

Advantage began by conducting an audit on GCC’s existing IT infrastructure. “When Paul approached Advantage with his plans for expansion, I knew straight away that there were key areas where we could help him out, however, as we do with all new clients, we needed to know exactly what was under the hood before we started giving any recommendations,” said Christo Van Zyl, managed services director at Advantage. They identified three critical areas that GCC needed to improve on: improve on: overspending, poor data backup and a lack of SQL support for enterprise resource planning.

Advantage addressed each of these issues, and now provides GCC with end-to-end IT management at a fraction of the cost of what GCC was already paying.

Next year Van Zyl and his team will be completing more work for GCC, migrating the business to an Azure cloud server and also installing Office 365. “Office 365 will empower Paul and his team with the tools they need to be productive anywhere, anytime on any device,” said Van ZYl.