Services Provided:

• Technical Consultation – Recommend solutions based on business requirements.
• System Engineering – Built custom solutions where no commercial option existed.
• Systems Integration – Created custom integrations between the phone system and CRM products.
• Maintenance and Support – Providing ongoing training, maintenance, and support.

Challenge:
Knoah Solutions needed to replace an unstable call center telephony system with a high availability system and integrate it with various CRM systems.

Benefits:

• Made the telephony system much more reliable
• Reduced infrastructure costs
• Provided skills not found in-house

About Knoah Solutions

Knoah Solutions, Inc. has provided management solutions for customers worldwide since 2006. The company offers business process outsourcing and contact center solutions. Knoah Solutions is now part of 24-7 Intouch.

The Knoah Solutions call center in Las Vegas, Nevada, serves a wide swath of different industries, including medical, real estate, housing services, and more. Knoah employees are custom trained to represent the interests and act on the behalf of each specific client when their customers call for help.

Background

The company’s telephony system is absolutely mission-critical to the business. Customer service representatives in the Las Vegas center alone take thousands of calls per day on behalf of Knoah’s clients. When Knoah changed phone system providers from Cisco to Asterisk, Cloud Brigade was called in to create a high availability system with automated failover and custom integrations with customer relationship management systems.

Business Challenges

• Business Bottlenecks – Knoah’s failover process for its telephony system was manual and kludgy. Calls and data could be lost in the transition from one system to another.
• Irresolvable Complexity – Cloud Brigade had to invent a high availability phone system and figure out why calls were dropping intermittently.
• Inefficient Systems and Processes – Cloud Brigade created custom integrations with CRM systems to pre-populate caller information so that customer service reps know a caller’s history.
• Skills and Staffing Gaps – Cloud Brigade provides unique expertise that Knoah’s IT team doesn’t have.

Why Cloud Brigade

Knoah’s IT team had just completed a migration from a Cisco telephony system to one based on the open source software Asterisk. Cloud Brigade was brought in to set up high availability failover in case of a massive failure of the primary system. High availability means that there is a replicated, stand-by system that can immediately and automatically take over operations if the main system fails for any reason.

Mike Barletta, IT Manager at Knoah Solutions, explains the reason Cloud Brigade was hired. “It’s an obscure bit of technology to work with telephony systems. Our internal team is good but we needed someone to deal with the minutiae. Finding someone with that knowledge is hard. Chris Miller and his team at Cloud Brigade have the tenacity to really dig in on these systems to help us get exactly what we need.”

Ensuring Availability of the Call Center Phone System

Cloud Brigade’s first assignment was to bring more reliability to the new PBX system based on Asterisk open source software. Knoah’s previous PBX system had a long history of failure, so setting up this mirror image failover capability was critical. At the time, there was no commercial high availability solution on the market, so Cloud Brigade architected and designed a system that replicated the primary PBX (“Side A”) to a secondary stand-by system (“Side B”). Both sides must stay in sync in terms of the capabilities and data they support. However, only one system is in use at a time.

Setting up a high availability system from scratch is a complicated process, notes Chris Miller, Founder and CEO of Cloud Brigade. “It’s not for the faint of heart,” says Miller. The Linux-HA system is very complex, and at that time the documentation was problematic. The Cloud Brigade team really had to dig to find the right information to get the system set up properly. Miller says there were challenges in figuring out how to do the storage replication and database replication to keep the A and B sides in total sync. Also, they had to come up with workarounds for the networking layer where the two sides have to communicate with each other. “We did a lot of testing until we were satisfied that the system would work well.”

As Knoah’s business grew, they needed to scale this phone system to accommodate a greater volume of calls. Cloud Brigade addressed the growth requirement by setting up clusters of high availability machines for the call center. Knoah’s various clients were assigned to different sets of computers that all had their Side A and Side B replication.

Cloud Brigade also set up a call center monitoring system based on QueueMetrics software. This lets Knoah track all sorts of metrics pertaining to the calls that come in and the call center agents’ performance. Cloud Brigade set it up to run outside of the PBX phone system, but also in high availability mode.

Cloud Brigade continues to maintain and support the telephony and metrics systems to keep them running smoothly. Every now and then a replication hiccup occurs and those issues get ironed out. The system that Cloud Brigade engineered has been remarkably stable over the years, providing Knoah with comfort knowing that calls will not be lost if there ever is a failure such as a server crash anywhere in the system.

Custom Integration Puts Caller Information on Agents’ Screens

The Knoah call center agents need to have as much information as possible about the people on the other end of a call—name, location, previous interactions with the call center, etc. This information comes from the customer relationship management systems like Salesforce belonging to each Knoah client. Having this information is made possible by the custom integrations Cloud Brigade developed between the call flow software and the clients’ different CRM applications. 

“When a call comes in, the system resolves the inbound number and does a database lookup. It populates the screen with data and pushes the link to the agent to view on their screen,” says Barletta. “This enables our agents to pick up the phone and say, ‘How are you doing today, Mike? I see that you have been a customer for 6 years.’ All of this takes place before the caller even says anything. We also have the person’s complete history of calling our support center. It’s a great way to put the callers at ease by showing that we know them and stand ready to help them. All of this happens because of the integrations Cloud Brigade set up for us.”

Cloud Brigade Tackles the Vexing Problems

The Cloud Brigade team has had to tackle a few really vexing issues that no one else could solve. “We had an oddball problem with calls occasionally getting disconnected,” says Barletta. “We didn’t know if the customer was upset and hung up on us, or if there was a technical issue that caused the call to drop. The problem was intermittent and we had no idea what caused it. We tossed it over the fence to Cloud Brigade. They had to be above our knowledge level to figure it out.”

There were a lot of links in the chain to look at as potential culprits—from the phone company, to the firewall, to Knoah’s network and the PBX. Digging into all the potential factors, Cloud Brigade discovered a feature in the firewall that played havoc with the phone system. 

“It turns out that our SonicWall firewall has a security feature that shifts traffic from one port to another every few minutes to prevent a sort of straight line through the firewall. It’s like a port redirection, making traffic do a zigzag through the firewall,” says Barletta. “It’s actually a security feature but it was terribly disruptive for our telephony traffic because our phone system is expecting everything to be coming from one port. Now, by design, the firewall was shifting ports. When a shift happened, calls would drop. And it would happen every 15 minutes or such, so when calls were short, they were fine. If a call ran as long as 15 minutes, or happened during a ‘shift episode,’ it would get cut off.”

“We wouldn’t have figured that out ourselves, but Chris at Cloud Brigade dug into the minutiae of the firewall to discover that feature. We reconfigured the firewall and eliminated the problem,” says Barletta.

There have been other instances of baffling issues that Cloud Brigade solved for Knoah Solutions. For example, at times the A/B replication of the phone system has had problems. “We’ve asked ourselves, ‘Shouldn’t it do that? Why didn’t it do that?’ We turn it over to Chris and feel confident he’ll get it resolved.”

Technology

• Software: Asterisk, FreePBX, QueueMetrics, CentOS Linux, Corosync, Pacemaker 
• Hardware: Supermicro servers
• Development Tools: Perl, PHP, Python

Services

• Technical Consultation – Recommend solutions based on business requirements.
• System Engineering – Built custom solutions where no commercial option existed.
• Systems Integration – Created custom integrations between the phone system and CRM products.
• Maintenance and Support – Providing ongoing training, maintenance, and support.

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Challenge

Gaps in IT maintenance and support left the MAH in dire straits with a hacked website and locked-out accounts.

Benefits

• Network performance has been improved
• The website is more stable and secure
• IT systems have been stabilized and improved for the long haul
• Cloud Brigade has provided knowledge transfer to IT staff at the MAH

About the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History

The MAH is a thriving community gathering place that serves more than 130,000 people annually through rotating art and history exhibitions, visual and performing artworks, public festivals, education and outreach programs, and cultural celebrations in collaboration with its many partners. It maintains a permanent collection of regionally significant art and artifacts, a research library, a historical archive, and historic sites. The MAH is also home to Abbott Square, a vibrant public plaza on the museum’s doorstep that offers food, social events, and year-round creative happenings.

Background

The small staff at the MAH focuses outward on making the facility a great gathering place for the Santa Cruz community. The internal IT needs were a low priority until issues came up. As a Santa Cruz-based business, Cloud Brigade stepped in to tame the issues and assume the tasks of long-term IT maintenance and support.

Business Challenges

• Skills and Staffing Gaps – The small staff is oriented toward museum operations instead of IT matters
• Inefficient Systems and Processes – A months-long gap in IT maintenance took its toll on business systems and the website
• Business Bottlenecks – Administrative accounts were inaccessible to current employees

Why Cloud Brigade

There was a short time when the museum was in between Executive Directors as well as several positions that maintained the technology infrastructure. Cloud Brigade was brought in to address some short- and long-term pain points while the museum searched for their new leader and filled the other positions. “They needed someone to keep things stable and solve some of the most critical issues until the new director could be hired,” says Chris Miller, Founder and CEO of Cloud Brigade. “They appreciate that we are a local tech company who can solve a wide range of problems.”

Improving the Network and IT Systems for the Long Haul

The MAH’s mixed-use complex includes their museum and their public plaza Abbott Square which is home to the European-style café, Abbott Square Market, and sublet office spaces. The network that provides connectivity across this sprawling complex includes a number of routers, switches, and wireless access points which must all work in unison. What’s more, there are private aspects to the network as well as public segments that can be used by guests.

When Cloud Brigade assumed management of this network, the company first performed a discovery project to gain access to and understand the Ubiquiti UniFi network as well as the general layout of other components like network storage, backup, VoIP phones, and SaaS applications such as Microsoft 365 email and collaboration tools. 

The first task undertaken to improve the network was migration of the Internet connection from wireless broadband to a newly launched fiber offering, both provided by Cruzio Internet. Although the MAH had a decent collection of IT documentation, they did not have staff members with the required level of technical knowledge to handle the migration, especially in the areas of mitigating downtime and addressing unexpected issues as they arose. 

As staff members came and went over the years, key access and configuration information was still attached to old employee accounts, presenting some challenges in gaining access to various aspects of the network and applications. Cloud Brigade resolved these issues to ensure that accounts are always accessible to current employees. Then, as restrictions for the pandemic hit the MAH, employees began to work remotely. Cloud Brigade set up VPN access to keep people connected to their network and fully productive during their work-from-home period. 

The MAH has a digital archival system for exhibits and other materials that must be maintained and synchronized with a storage facility in the cloud. “We have to make sure the data is protected so they have historical reference for all these cool art exhibits and projects they’ve done,” says Chris Miller. Cloud Brigade adopted a multi-faceted network storage system to store the digital assets and provide a local backup system for network assets.

A Hacker Took the Website Down on a Busy Holiday Weekend

Three years ago, the MAH engaged an outside marketing agency to design and develop a new website. The agency completed the development task and handed the new website over to museum staffers, but there was no plan for ongoing updates and support. Eight months later, the museum paid the price for overlooking software updates and regular maintenance: the website was hacked and was no longer visible to the public. 

When the cyber-attack happened over a busy holiday weekend, Cloud Brigade received an automated alert that the museum’s website was offline. Chris Miller notified Chance Decker, the MAH’s Director of Development and Communications, that the website was in trouble. Miller worked with the original website developer to get through the complex technical issues and get the website back up and running as usual.  

“That automatic notification that Cloud Brigade had set up was really helpful to getting us back online,” says Decker. “I think having the site go down uncovered more issues that showed how out of date we were in terms of updates for some of our plug-ins and the software itself.”

Following the hacking event, Cloud Brigade performed a discovery on the state of the website and underlying infrastructure and proposed an upgrade plan. The website hadn’t received software updates in some period of time, and as a result of complex changes to its content management software (CMS), it was not easily upgraded using the normal processes. Cloud Brigade worked with the MAH and the original web developer to identify the source of the issues, manage the upgrade process, and migrate the website to a more appropriate hosting solution that could better accommodate the CMS. With the website now stabilized and fortified, Cloud Brigade has assumed its ongoing maintenance and support.

 “Cloud Brigade made some recommendations on changing our web hosting service and a few other things to stabilize our website and help it operate at its top capacity,” says Chance Decker, Director of Development and Communications, Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History.

Cloud Brigade Provides Knowledge Transfer and a Safety Net

Over the years, Cloud Brigade has assumed more and more responsibility over various aspects of the museum’s IT operations. “We’ve provided new employee onboarding services and support to staff to add new employees to the MAH’s email, voice system, Microsoft 365 suite, and computer systems within the office,” says Miller. “We’ve identified risk and mitigated potential failures of key systems in order to prevent outages and data loss. We’ve taken the systems off auto-pilot and ensure they are well managed and maintained.”

Where feasible, Cloud Brigade sets things up and then turns over day-to-day operations to the IT team at the MAH. “They often show us what they did and how we can handle things ourselves going forward,” says Hans Wuerfmannsdobler, Director of Finance and Administration at the MAH. “We’ll figure out the things that are easy for us to handle and the frontline things we can troubleshoot ourselves and then leave the more complicated issues to Cloud Brigade. It might take us a few hours to figure something out, whereas Cloud Brigade can solve it in 10 or 20 minutes. We want to make the best use of our time.”

Technology

• Software: Craft CMS, PHP, Amazon Lightsail, Amazon S3, Cloudflare, imgix, MySQL
• Hardware: Ubiquiti Networks, Windows Server, Synology NAS

Services

• IT maintenance and Support- Addressed numerous short-term “pain points” and assumed ongoing maintenance and support of the network and other systems
• Website maintenance and Support– Mitigated s hacking attack and assumed ongoing maintenance and support of the website

Partners

Amazon, Kinsta

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Challenge

Visit Santa Cruz County needed to migrate its website and content management system to a more modern platform.

Benefits

• The new web platform allows for easy update of partner information, blog posts, calendar events, and other information by internal staff- thus eliminating the need for third party content updated
• Custom analytics help track paid online partner listing and elevated placements on the website
• Important new features, including event calendaring, have been added to the website
• Backend business processes significantly improved in efficiency

About Visit Santa Cruz County

Visit Santa Cruz County (VSCC) is a non-profit organization with a mission to stimulate the local economy by promoting Santa Cruz County as a visitor, conference/meeting, and film destination through a variety of marketing and promotional programs. These include advertising, public relations, and visitor services. VSCC’s priority is to attract high-yield overnight business during the off-peak periods of the year. There are over 3 million visitor trips taken to Santa Cruz County each year. As the area’s official Destination Marketing Organization, VSCC is the best resource for visitors to obtain travel-related information about the area. Including where to stay, what to see and do, and where to eat.

Background

The VSCC website is an essential platform to promote partner businesses such as hotels, motels, vacation rentals, bed and breakfast inns, restaurants, retailers, and a variety of other tourism-related businesses and activities across the county for visitors and locals. The website attracts a million visitors each year. In 2018, VSCC undertook a project to modernize the backend infrastructure of the website to enhance the user experience. Having won a competitive bid process for the revamp work, Cloud Brigade migrated the website to a more modern platform and built enhancements to support VSCC’s business and technological needs.

Business Challenges

• More Streamlined Systems and Processes Were Needed – Updating website content required coding that could not be delegated to non-technical staff members
• Business Bottlenecks – Website content updates were outsourced to a third party
• Excessive Operational Costs – Too much staff time was devoted to updating website content 
• Generic Technology – The website and content management system were based on technology that required features to be custom-built

Why Cloud Brigade

VSCC held an open bid process and Cloud Brigade submitted a proposal. In addition to presenting VSCC with a very competitive bid, Cloud Brigade emphasized its experience with migrating complex applications such as websites and the content management systems behind them. “We seem to have found a niche in fixing websites that no longer meet their owners’ needs,” says Chris Miller, Founder and CEO of Cloud Brigade. “In VSCC’s case, the technology needed to be updated and more closely managed. We earned their trust that we could build them a much more robust website that would be simpler to use and maintain, and we would do our best to retain their search rankings.” 

A Complex Migration of Website and Content

VSCC’s initial website was built on a platform that was not user friendly. It had been highly customized because their previous CMS lacked an ecosystem of feature plug-ins. Every time VSCC needed a new feature, it had to be created from scratch. As a result, it was a challenge to support the website and it no longer met the organization’s expanding needs. As VSCC programs matured and became more integrated, its online presence needed to reflect an elevated image and more advanced online experience for visitors, locals, and stakeholders.

In addition, VSCC stored partner information using FileMaker, a customer relationship management (CRM) system. The website sourced data from FileMaker to present in real time. VSCC wanted to transition to Simpleview, a database tool specifically designed for destination marketing organizations. Partners were accustomed to using FileMaker to update their own information and would need to be migrated to and trained on the Simpleview platform.

Cloud Brigade proposed to migrate the VSCC website and all its content to WordPress, a modern platform chosen for its ease of use and extensibility. WordPress has many commercially-available plug-in functions, enabling the platform to be easily customized unlike DNN where plug-ins need to be created by hand.

VSCC wanted to retain the look of its original website, so Cloud Brigade replicated the design in WordPress. The more challenging aspect of the migration was bringing the web content forward. Everything had to be migrated permanently to WordPress while the partner content, now moved to Simpleview, had to be brought into WordPress in real time as determined by user searches. There is no existing integration between Simpleview and WordPress so Cloud Brigade constructed a system that accesses Simpleview’s API to look for new or changed partner listings and dynamically create, delete, or update that information in WordPress. 

VSCC also generates marketing forms within Simpleview. Cloud Brigade is dynamically generating those forms on the WordPress website. Cloud Brigade has implemented a number of marketing integrations to allow VSCC to track activities related to paid online partner listings and elevated placements.  

Preserving Critically Important SEO Ranking

Search engine optimization (SEO) has been a top concern throughout the website migration. Over the years, VSCC has spent considerable time and money ensuring that its web content appears at the top of web searches. High ranking search results are a critically important way to draw more visitors to a website. Therefore, Cloud Brigade wanted to preserve the hard-earned SEO rankings as much as possible. 

Building a new website and changing the content or the URL page-naming structure can play havoc with SEO. Cloud Brigade developed internal tools that enabled a comparative audit between the old and the new websites. The tool is able to find where pages, content, or the URL changed that will result in a drop-off of SEO rankings. Thus, Cloud Brigade is able to address those issues to preserve a high degree of their SEO placement.  

Behind the scenes, the website and content migration process was very complex which involved a lot of moving parts. Cloud Brigade’s task was akin to changing the tires on a bus while the bus is in motion—and they did it successfully. 

Long-Term Benefits of the New Website

Migrating the website to WordPress from had many benefits. VSCC’s Online Marketing Director, Daryl Zape oversaw the entire migration process from beginning to end. “Having a user-friendly website for our staff to access internally was very important to us,” says Zape. “I know how to code but it was critical for other staff members to be able to update content on their own, so making the website functionality as easy to use as possible was important to us.” Zape adds that WordPress is more SEO-friendly and internal staff members can now post their own blog content and add new events to the online calendar.

“Just having our people be able to access the website with little or no knowledge of coding has been very beneficial to us. We have been able to eliminate a third-party provider to update our web content, saving us time and resources” says Zape. 

Zape says that Cloud Brigade offers excellent customer service. “Being able to learn from the professionals at Cloud Brigade, and learning what they are doing behind the scenes, has been so helpful. Their project manager is always on top of the projects. She’s very upfront and transparent about what is going on. The developers are helpful and show me their coding behind the scenes. They explain what the issues are in terms that are easy to understand and respond to our needs in a timely manner.”

Cloud Brigade chose a new cloud hosting provider for VSCC’s website and content management system and set up custom caching to increase the website speed. Backups and a staging environment were used to test all upgrades before pushing them into production. Cloud Brigade continues to provide infrastructure support and maintenance. 

“The collaborative effort over the last three years with Cloud Brigade has enabled us to stay competitive with our online presence,” says Zape. 

Technology

• Software: WordPress, MySQL, Simpleview
• Programming Language: PHP
• PaaS: Kinsta
• IaaS: AWS

Services

• Cloud Infrastructure: Providing ongoing support for new cloud hosting environment. Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud), RDS (Relational Database Service), Simple Storage Service (S3)

• Application Support: Migrated the web content to a new platform and preserved critical SEO links
• Software Development – Developed a new website on a modern platform

Partners

Amazon, Kinsta

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