Case Study: CMIT Solutions Fills a Key Need

Zorus Partner Case Study
by Howard M. Cohen

CMIT Solutions of Atlanta Southern Crescent provides IT consulting and computer support services to South Atlanta, Fayette, and Coweta counties and surrounding areas, including tech support, strategic advice, technological expertise, and the kind of insight and partnership clients expect from a trusted advisor. Specialties include new network installation, network migrations, outsourced support for companies with or without an IT department, managed services and system monitoring, network security, firewall testing, disaster recovery planning, web hosting and web design, cabling and wireless installations, remote access solutions, data recovery, and voice over IP (VoIP) installations.

Their motto is: Stay up. Stay running. Stay protected. No matter what.

The First Step to Success is Software Selection

Brian D’Arcy, Vice President of IT Services at CMIT Solutions Atlanta Southern Crescent made a decision, determining the need to replace his team’s DNS filtering solution. The current solution came from a company that had been acquired by an IT industry giant and, in Brian’s estimation, had gone downhill from there. Once he knew he had lost faith in the product, he knew it was time to replace it, which would leave a functionality gap in his stack that would have to be filled quickly.

Proactively, D’Arcy began calling many of the colleagues he had befriended over his long tenure in the IT industry. When several of them mentioned Zorus, his next call was to them, requesting a demonstration. He reports, “Literally 24 hours later, I was rocking and rolling and testing it out. That simple!”

D’Arcy was pleased with what he found, explaining, “Traditional DNS filtering products have a tendency to be noisy and generate support tickets because they tend to break a lot of things that are already in place. They don’t always work well with Active Directory. They don’t always work well with VPN. These are just nuances of the product and from a technical perspective, we become accustomed to those.”

He continues, adding, “One of the things that really drew me to the product, once I started exploring it and testing it internally, was their taking a different approach that doesn’t break VPNs, doesn’t break Active Directory and doesn’t break custom DNS implementations because of the way they go about whitelisting and blacklisting.” 

Completing his technical evaluation, D’Arcy concludes, “How they look up the results, they tend to not get in the way and break things. That was the biggest technical thing for me. Also, installation and management of the product itself, it’s just a piece of cake. It’s just simple. Install it, push it out through your RMM tool with whatever configuration you want, and it just works.”

Beyond the Technology is the Relationship with the Developer

“It’s not just the ease of installation,” adds D’Arcy. “It’s not just the functionality of the product. It’s also the company behind it. 

Asked to expand upon the point, D’Arcy explains, “Can I pick up the phone? Can I get a hold of my rep on any given day? Or? Or does he at least call me back within a respectable timeframe? Or she? Can I get a hold of the support department? You know, are they accessible? Everything, everything about Zorus has a really healthy mix. It’s like they’re saying, hey, look at us, we’re new! We’re a small business, and we’re so cool that we can run a Discord server, right for our support for support teams, and for the clients to come in.”

He then hastens to include, “They’re a small company making big lead products that work. I think they’re doing a really good job with the identity that they’ve been able to present and still maintain that small business feel, while obviously on a path to growth, and I really hope they can keep that alive as they grow. A lot of companies lose that over time.”

D’Arcy readily acknowledges that, while he can explain the technology behind every product in their stack, demonstrations are not his greatest strength. For those, he turns to his contact at Zorus who readily schedules one of their experts to provide customer demonstrations when necessary. This is just one example of the support he enjoys from Zorus. “When I ask a question, the people that are in that chat are smart enough to know when something goes higher than they’re ready for and they’ll get a developer involved or escalated to a developer straightaway. It’s always been very immediate from a problem and escalation standpoint.

A Simple Summary

When other CMIT franchisees ask Brian how he’s doing with Zorus, his response is simple. “Easy to deploy, easy to manage. Doesn’t break your environment like traditional DNS filtering. Cost effective as well!”