“The Pioneers of Digital Transformation”

With COVID-19 necessitating social distancing and work from home, businesses have been facing an unprecedented level of IT challenges. The need for digital transformation is not just an outcome of COVID-19, it has been coming for several years. Dartmouth based Digital nGenuity have been moving clients to Cloud based solutions that allow employees to work from anywhere. This includes file access, email and even Cloud hosted Phone systems. When the pandemic hit their clients were ready to work remotely. After the initial work to make it happen, they have been working with many clients on making the changes permanent and part of their new standards.

Digital nGenuity has been serving Atlantic Canada for over 17 years, “we live here, we work here and are proud to say we are a locally owned and operated company,” says Joel Rafuse, CEO and Owner of Digital nGenuity. When he founded Digital nGenuity in the early 1990’s, the company started servicing legal clients. There was a need for computers to talk to each other and share documents. He had training in Novell and started setting up NetWare networks for the firms to make their operations much more efficient allowing the users to share, store and retrieve documents “over the wire”. “From there we grew to become a strong Microsoft Certified Partner and have evolved our services and knowledge to serve the SMB market.”

"We handle all aspects of IT for our clients from workstations and servers, mobile devices, to security, networking and cloud services."

Digital nGenuity’s model is to become the IT department for companies that do not have their own IT department. “We handle all aspects of IT for our clients from workstations and servers, mobile devices, to security, networking and cloud services,” says Rafuse. “Building good relationships with suppliers is critical to ensuring that the solutions we provide to our clients are reliable and robust. When problems arise, we work closely with our suppliers to help troubleshoot the problems and get to a resolution quickly for our clients.” Rafuse adds, “without the support of those suppliers it could take longer to solve problems or even to get the solutions implemented in the first place. Our whole ethos is to provide an excellent client experience in all we do and suppliers help us achieve that goal.”

Digital nGenuity starts with a Site Review of the client’s existing infrastructure and discusses any pain points the client is experiencing. From that they approach solutions from a cost-effective perspective with three primary considerations in mind:

• Security

• Backup & Disaster Recovery

• Productivity

Once satisfied that Security and Backup & Disaster Recovery are in hand they progress to infrastructure and productivity. Often improvements can be as simple as upgrading Internet Service performance, replacing 10/100 switches with 10/100/1000 (GB) Switches, upgrading computer storage drives from traditional SATA Hard Drives to SSD or later generation NVMe SSD Drives and so on. At the Server level changing RAID Arrays from RAID5/6 SATA or SAS Hard Drives to RAID 10 SSD Arrays can deliver significant Server I/O performance benefits very cost-effectively. Each client site presents unique challenges based on the client need, either expressed or determined, which is tempered by available financial resources. “It is in these areas that our creative approaches are best realized,” adds Rafuse.

According to Rafuse, “I think the thing that differentiates us from many of our competitors is that we truly believe in our mission statement: We believe in old school values and are proud to continue these traditions where businesses are honest in their practices and deliver high quality, reliable products and services and make them available for a fair price. We strive to be available to our prospects and customers for customer service and to provide knowledgeable honest responses in the best interest of the customer. We do not strive to make the most money (at the expense of poor customer service) or be the largest company (bigger is not always better in our book), but rather strive to build a strong resilient company that focuses on a quality experience for its customers, prospects and employees.” IE