Case Study: Epilepsy Foundation of America
Epilepsy Foundation of America undergoes IT transformation for digital-first operations and nationwide expansion
About our Customer
With a network of partners throughout the United States, the Epilepsy Foundation is leading the fight to overcome the challenges of living with epilepsy. The Foundation connects people to treatment, support and resources; leads advocacy efforts, funds innovative research and the training of specialists; and educates the public about epilepsy and seizure first aid. For more than five decades, the Epilepsy Foundation has shone a light on epilepsy to promote awareness and understanding, and to advocate for laws that matter to people with epilepsy, while also funding epilepsy research and supporting epilepsy investigators and specialists in their early careers.
In partnership with the CDC, the Epilepsy Foundation has helped to improve access to care for people with epilepsy, expanded its digital reach and online resources in homes across the country, and trained more than 600,000 people in seizure recognition and first aid. The Epilepsy Foundation continues to focus on serving the epilepsy community through advocacy, education, direct services, and research for new therapies.
"We had a system that went from being in an IT closet in our Landover office, to going into a data center and then being migrated partially to the cloud."
IT Administrator
Challenge
Small IT team multi-tasking responsibilities
User support demands taking up too much time
De-centralized infrastructure with manual device configurations
VPN for file access and collaboration
Like most organizations over the past few years, the Epilepsy Foundation had been strategically chipping away at their digital transformation goals. However, the pandemic forced them to significantly ramp up their efforts. With a relatively small IT team, a limited budget and newly acquired chapters spread across the country, the Foundation was feeling the strain.
The organization was dealing with the challenges of an aging infrastructure, a growing number of remote users, the inability to manage field devices from a centralized location, and the need to reduce manual work for device configuration.
Despite the Foundation enabling remote work for a handful of users before the pandemic, the sudden volume of users logging into the VPN slowed down performance and limited access to certain applications as well as shared folders.
Solution
"We needed a partner that could bring new and relevant products to help us move from a paper-based organization to a more digital operation — and Ricoh filled that gap at just the right time."
- IT Administrator
Ricoh IT Services Help Desk for remote and hands-on user support
Migration to a secure, scalable cloud infrastructure
Employee self-help solutions
Managed Security Services for network and endpoint management
After transferring the responsibility of IT support to Ricoh’s Help Desk, the Foundation was able to focus their efforts on several strategic upgrades. While in the midst of simplifying their infrastructure, it was clear the Foundation needed more than just a VPN to support their remote workforce and digital initiatives.
Although several remote workers in the past relied on a VPN login to access the organization’s network and files, it wasn’t enough to support a long-term remote and digital-first strategy — something that was not only imperative during the pandemic but also part of their CEO’s vision for the future. Knowing the limitations of their budget, Ricoh worked closely with EF staff to champion a cloud migration strategy that would be best for the Foundation: “They worked with us as best as possible, which is how we ended up with the hybrid model we have now to meet our needs with the budget we had.”
As part of the infrastructure overhaul, all the files that were stored on a server in a Ricoh-owned data center were migrated over to SharePoint and various applications from local servers were migrated to the cloud. To further support remote-work collaboration, security, and data retention policies the Foundation migrated to Microsoft 365.
Ricoh enabled additional capabilities for employee self-help solutions, remote management, and automated device configuration, in addition to a fully managed backup and retention solution for SharePoint and OneDrive.
Results
Eliminated IT closet and reduced monthly hardware costs
Strengthened their security posture
Successfully migrated to a hybrid cloud model
Regained bandwidth to focus on strategic IT need
EF brought on a new IT Systems Administrator in 2022 and has since been able to further strengthen the partnership with Ricoh. Now, according to EF, the solutions that have been put in place by Ricoh “free us up to look at the future and find ways to improve our processes internally and implement technology that is most strategic for us, while also improving our security posture.”
Thanks in large part to the many functionalities that come with Microsoft products, EF has automated many of the manual device configurations that come with new workstation setups.
In addition to advanced multi-factor authentication and conditional access policies that provide another layer of data security, the organization also leverages the expertise of Ricoh’s Managed Security Services. EF can rely on a team of 24/7/365 security experts to provide ongoing monitoring and management of their network and endpoint devices.
And with the partnership the Foundation has with Ricoh, there are now plans to mature their security posture with enhanced capabilities from Microsoft 365 as well as other cybersecurity solutions.