Introduction
CareVest® Capital Inc. (“CareVest”) is a Canadian commercial mortgage broker and lender with offices in Alberta and British Columbia. With 30 full time employees, CareVest provides customized mortgage financing solutions for Canada’s real estate industry by originating, structuring, and administering mortgage investment for certain Mortgage Investment Corporations (“MICs”) managed by Carecana™ Management Corp. (“Carecana”), a restricted portfolio manager and investment fund manager that is a related entity of CareVest., and other lenders. CareVest has been in existence since 1994 and Carecana has been in existence 2010. Since 2010, the MICs have funded approximately $1.7 billion in mortgage opportunities referred by CareVest.
CareVest/Carecana has been a client of Wappo’s for over 10 years and having them as client has been a great experience. Providing service around financial activity means putting an emphasis on security and responsibility for us. Delivering our best service was necessary because like most companies, they needed as little downtime as possible. To keep them up to date, we had to work around their daily routine.
Assessment
As a long-time client, we were tasking with designing the next generation of hardware/software environment with learnings from our previous years of maintenance. We identified a couple critical areas that would provide the most improvement for the client.
Recommendations
After identifying the two key elements, we assembled our recommendations.
Implementation
Once we discussed the recommendations with the client and gained their approval, we begin the implementation phase. At this point we set deadlines and an action plan with the client, and after multiple discussions about various options and time frames, a staged approached was approved. These are the steps we took with CareVest/Carecana:
Azure Site Recovery was setup first as the need for disaster recovery was the client’s primary concern.
Once the implementation was complete, we utilized the Test Failover function as part of Azure Site Recovery. Users were able to log into the test environment and confirm access to data and applications with no dependency to the onsite hardware.
Site Recovery allowed for the test to be carried out in a matter of hours. The previous method required shipping physical backup media to the co-location site and restoring. It took days and the data was often at least a week old.
Moving email offsite to Office 365 provides the greatest improvement to the most users. Implementation went smooth for users within the office and remotely.
After the migration was complete, we could reallocate the physical resources to boost performance of other systems in the client’s environment.
We were also able to license the full Office Suite for desktop and upgrade all staff to the same most current edition, including Microsoft Teams. This provides a more consistent experience for staff within the office and remote.
Achievements:
The results for all the planning and work with CareVest/Carecana helped the organization in many aspects. Specifically, with data protection, business continuity, remote work, and collaborative work. Site Recovery and a test Disaster Recovery restore were successful, providing business and IT peace of mind. CareVest/Carecana’s environment includes multiple virtual servers such as: DC, App, SQL, and RDS. Being able to restore all those systems together quickly and efficiently was a big win.
In addition, the company’s email has been uninterrupted since the migration. The removal of Exchange servers from the onsite server freed up a large portion of disk space. This allowed us to initialize Shadow Copy on the primary data shares providing a convenient way for users to go back to earlier versions of a document, reducing the IT overhead of restoring folders or files from backup.
Both projects were implemented to remove some of the reliance on the physical office space. Having the core communication platform of Email now offsite ensures that the team will stay connected. Moving to Azure Site Recovery allowed for the decommission of the old co-location which saves money. In addition, Microsoft Teams was implemented to give even more flexibility and communication options. Teams was key in dealing with the current COVID-19 protocols in 2020 with more staff working remotely from each other.