North American Material Trading Company, a metal trading and processing firm headquartered in Cleveland, Ohio, recently acquired two nearby manufacturing plants and opened a satellite office in Tampa, Florida. It wasn't long before management realized that each location featured a disconnected jumble of outdated equipment.
The company now had three separate, stand-alone phone systems that barely worked and racked up unusually high phone bills. A variety of older computers were badly in need of replacement. There was no central server, and the new plants were using an unreliable hosted e-mail service. On top of those problems, none of the four locations had adequate network security in place.
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