Tandem HR is a human resource consulting firm specializing in a range of HR services that address the needs of small and midsize businesses. From reducing costs to maximizing employee benefits to ensuring compliance, Tandem HR’s customized human resource solutions address the full employee lifecycle.

Since 1998, Tandem HR’s mission has been to provide customized and high-touch human resource solutions to organizations, enabling their growth and creating phenomenal company culture. As part of that mission, the company’s business and IT leaders recognize the need to modernize IT in order to deliver the necessary levels of security, functionality, and efficiency required to keep employees productive – and ultimately drive greater business value.

The Need for Modernization

In an increasingly digital marketplace, digital disruption had started to impose greater demands on the company’s internal IT department to continuously retain, extend, and modernize legacy technology in order to increase value and maintain a competitive footing.

By tapping their existing partnership with BDO Digital’s Managed Services, Tandem HR was looking to build a robust IT strategy that enabled the organization to effectively respond to the business’ evolving needs. They recognized the value of leveraging an outside partner for additional bandwidth and expertise in areas such as cloud computing, cybersecurity, and IT strategy aligned to business objectives.

Exploring Digital Innovation to Advance Business Strategy

As part of the company’s digital transformation strategy, BDO Digital worked with various departments to identify what applications could be moved from legacy traditional IT models to easier, more cost-efficient and agile service structures in the cloud.

With an initial focus on cost-savings and better service delivery, the company built a productivity roadmap strategy, beginning by accelerating the adoption of cloud email and collaboration tools with Office 365 – a move that would save the company approximately $130,000 over a 5-year timeframe!

In addition to cost-savings, Tandem HR’s investment in Office 365 helped position the organization to take advantage of new technologies to improve performance. BDO Digital helped the company identify other email features within their Office 365 licensing agreement, such as unlimited inbox (no archiving) and eDiscovery (company-wide email search) to significantly improve user experience and free up IT resources to focus on more value-added initiatives. The investment also helped pave the way for implementing other high-potential technologies – such as SharePoint Online as an extension of their email migration strategy.

Protecting Against Modern Threats

Without a clearly defined security program in place, Tandem HR’s business and IT leaders had concerns about their security posture in the face of modern threats, compliance, and regulations. Tandem HR and BDO Digital worked together to develop and implement a strategy to ramp up their security program that would adhere to impending HIPAA laws, NYDFS, etc.

Additionally, the company was running vulnerability reports to uncover gaps in their defense. However, these reports lacked clarity and direction. As a result, they were largely underutilized and did very little to guide the company’s security strategy in the right direction.

BDO Digital engaged Tandem HR in a holistic security roadmap, which included vulnerability reports, compliance gap analysis, security remediation, and future plans to leverage BDO Digital’s security managed services to stay ahead of compliance in the future.

As an initial step, BDO Digital revamped the Tandem HR’s vulnerability report to correlate the items on the checklist to tasks aligned to the company’s most valuable assets. As a result, Tandem HR’s IT team could begin to build a reasonable model for estimating their organization’s level of protection and take action to protect against the company’s most likely threats.

BDO Digital’s Vulnerability Management Program allowed Tandem HR access to a wide range of competencies that are needed to tackle today’s complex threat landscape. BDO Digital’s security experts were able to execute on vulnerability assessments and analyze the results, as well as offer recommendations that aligned with the company’s long-term goals. The program required minimal analysis or interpretation from internal staff, allowing their team to focus on other strategic initiatives that continue to grow the business.

Realizing Greater Opportunities and Enhanced Security in the Cloud

Like most well-established businesses, many of Tandem HR’s mission-critical applications had been developed in a pre-cloud era. As such, concerns around security, compliance, and compatibility often stemmed from outdated legacy systems.

With a fresh look at the organization’s security posture, Tandem HR was focused on building a more flexible, stable, and reliable architecture in the cloud to streamline business operations and protect against modern threats.

For instance, the company’s firewalls were nearing the end-of-life. Not only were these legacy systems not designed to protect against today’s threats, but the older firewalls were running on older code which was time-consuming to upgrade. Additionally, supporting the hardware and IPS modules was becoming cost prohibitive compared to newer solutions.

BDO Digital recommended core infrastructure and backup upgrades for more reliable and highly available servers and data protection. Moving to the cloud simplified management of the business environment and alleviated many of the burdens that come with maintaining on-premises hardware and software.

Beyond addressing their immediate security, compliance, and operational concerns, Tandem HR’s engagement with BDO Digital provided to be a powerful partnership. With a strong foundation build in the cloud, Tandem HR is poised to more readily and easily drive the company’s mission and thrive in today’s fast-paced business environment.