OREANDA-NEWS. OneNeck® IT Solutions announced today the signing of a multi-year contract with Braun Intertec to become their new hybrid IT partner. With operations in several communities in Minnesota and around the U.S., Braun Intertec is contracting for colocation space and managed services at OneNeck's Tier III design-certified data center in Minnesota as well as for hardware procurement, solution design and implementation services.

Braun Intertec is an employee-owned geotechnical engineering, environmental consulting and testing firm with more than 1,200 employees across the country.

"After an extensive and thorough RFP process, we chose OneNeck," said James Bird, IT Director at Braun Intertec. "OneNeck met every criterion we were looking for. They are capable, offer local support, and have both a nearby physical location as well as connected remote data centers. They have the expertise to manage our services, deploy the necessary hardware, and design and implement our IT services. Plus, they have the ability to scale with us as we continue to grow."

There were a number of reasons Braun Intertec was looking for a new way of managing their IT environment. The number one reason, however, was related to the availability and safe keeping of their data. By moving it into OneNeck's data center, Braun Intertec is adding additional elements of physical and logical security as well as redundancy and high availability for power and cooling. Among the security measures OneNeck already has in place are limited employee access, multi-factor authentication and environmental controls.

Another key reason Braun Intertec wanted to change the way IT is managed was to free up their staff's time to focus on moving the company forward. According to Bird, when the company started the RFP process in August 2015, their engineers were spending the majority of their time on mundane tasks such as monitoring IT systems, patching, and managing logs. He said, "We recognized that with a hybrid IT solution, we could offload some tasks to create time for our internal team to focus on our core strategy."

With access to the technical experts on staff at OneNeck, "Now we have lots of flexibility as far as who does what," Bird noted. "We can bring in their experts when necessary, for as long as necessary. There's no need for us to go through the hiring and onboarding process, especially for short-term projects. By leveraging OneNeck's resources, we became nimbler, faster and more efficient."

In March, Braun Intertec began racking equipment for their production environment in OneNeck's data center, with the goal of converting the data room in their Bloomington, Minn. office into a disaster recovery site. In late April, they began data migrations and testing in preparation for the first turn up, which is scheduled for July.

"We couldn't be more pleased with this opportunity to partner with Braun Intertec on the development of their hybrid IT solution," said Terry Swanson, senior vice president of Sales and Marketing at OneNeck. "Together, we will continue to identify the right solutions to help the Braun Intertec IT team have more time to focus on growing their business."

OneNeck IT Solutions offers a full suite of hybrid IT solutions including cloud and hosting solutions, managed services, ERP application management, professional services, IT hardware, and state-of-the-art data centers in Arizona, Colorado, Iowa, Minnesota, Oregon and Wisconsin. 

About Braun Intertec
Braun Intertec is a 100 percent employee-owned award-winning consulting firm offering geotechnical, environmental and testing solutions in the private and public sectors. Founded in 1957, the firm now has 16 offices located across the Midwest and Texas and more than 1,000 employee owners. Braun has consistently been recognized as a Top Workplace by the Minneapolis Star Tribune and named a Best Places to Work by the Minneapolis/St. Paul Business Journal. Visit braunintertec.com.

About OneNeck
OneNeck® IT Solutions LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Telephone and Data Systems, employs nearly 550 people throughout the U.S. The company offers a full suite of hybrid IT solutions including cloud and hosting solutions, managed services, ERP application management, professional services, and IT hardware. OneNeck has Tier 3 data centers in Arizona, Colorado, Iowa, Minnesota, Oregon and Wisconsin.