Pyramid Consulting has been in the Information Technology business since 1994. We’ve been managing IT for CPA firms for that entire time. We handle IT for a wide range of businesses, with a particular focus on Accounting and Law firms. Anyone interested in our services can talk to our clients. None of our clients is under a term contract; they stay with us because we provide excellent service.
Datacenters are located in Michigan, New Jersey, Dallas, and Los Angeles, built to serve financial, pharmaceutical, and high-tech industries.
- Power: N+1, N+2, 2N w/UPS units and onsite generators
- Security: Perimeter fencing, guardhouse checkpoint, card reader access, security guards onsite 24x7x365
- Compliance: SOC 1, SOC 2, HITRUST, PCI, ISO 27001
- Fully redundant internet
The options are endless but are provided à la carte. You choose the level of redundancy that is important to you.
Everyone gets 4-3-2 backups.
Everyone gets redundant internet in case one provider goes down, you’re automatically routed through a 2nd provider.
Optional: Redundant servers. We can set you up with either auto-failover or manual failover. It just depends on your requirements. Maintaining dual servers increases your cost but improves reliability in case one server fails. We have different levels of redundant servers—full redundancy to guarantee 100% uptime, or a combination of full and partial redundancy. Let’s discuss which option makes sense for your firm. Fill out the contact form below, and we’ll give you the full details.
We always have excess capacity and spare servers online, so even if you choose not to pay for auto failover, we can quickly move you to a spare server in the event of a server failure. It’s the difference between an immediate failover (no downtime) and a manual failover, where your server is moved onto another server (requires an hour or so of downtime).
The industry-recommended backup is 3-2-1
- 3 copies of your data (your production data and two backup copies) on two different media (disk and tape) with 1 copy off-site for disaster recovery.
We go beyond that.
- 4 production backups. Two are stored locally for quick access. One backup is taken every 15 minutes, and the other is taken twice per day. Two others are stored offsite.
- 3 different types of media. We use three different methods to back up the data in case one method is breached. We don’t use tape; it’s too slow. Everything is on a disk somewhere.
- 2 offsite backups that are firewalled and cut off by the outside world. Accessible only to us. Why two? In case one is breached, corrupted, or fails for any reason.
We also give you the option to store an off-site backup at a location of your choosing. Maybe a NAS at your office, maybe your own AWS, Wasabi, or Backblaze account. We think it’s essential for our clients to have a copy of their data that is accessible to them at any time.
What if you return to the file and find that the backup is corrupted or the recovery fails? I don’t care how often you verify the integrity of the backup; problems can happen.
Ransomware will target your local backups; therefore, you need a copy stored off-site, inaccessible from the servers. What if that copy is corrupted? That’s why we have two.
We believe it’s essential for clients to have access to their data, regardless of the situation. Perhaps a hurricane or tornado takes your internet out for days or weeks. Maybe it’s a terrorist attack that takes the internet down for an entire region, perhaps a fiber cut taking out a whole area of the United States. Maybe it happens on April 12th, 3 days before the tax season deadline.
As an option, we put a server at your office that stays in sync with your cloud server. It’s not a backup; it’s a hot server that is always up to date and ready to boot. This can be a cheap server capable of handling a small user load, it could be an old clunker, or even a cheap desktop. It’s a spare just in case. We hope you never need to use it, but it’s an insurance policy in case of a widespread internet outage during a critical time. This server can be booted, your desktops directed to it, and everyone can go back to work. The server will be in sync with the cloud server within 15 minutes, minimizing data loss.
It depends on what you have in place at your office. We recommend setting up a full-time VPN between your office and the cloud server to enable two-way communication. That makes it easier to access your office equipment for printing and scanning. It also allows your scanner/copy machine to access the server for scanning documents into your document management application (e.g. FileCabinet). It also ensures there is a secure tunnel between the remote computer and the server. We offer multiple VPN and multi-factor authentication (MFA) options, and we’ll determine the best one after discussing your environment.
Work-from-home users will use a VPN and MFA to connect to the server.
It’s fair to say, we are faster than anything you’ve tried. How do we know that? We’ve encountered users on AWS, Azure, Virtual Office (VO), Rackspace, and just about every other cloud service out there. Clients with new servers that are not performing as expected. Clients have come to us with files that previously took 45 minutes to open but now open in just 2-3 seconds on our server.
We build our servers for performance. You can’t buy these servers; our system architects designed and built them from scratch. Our servers are optimized for your accounting programs and easily support 25 users. If you have more than 25 users, we’ll spread them across multiple servers, depending on your environment. You will never be bothered by performance issues again. We will add resources before you feel the impact. We can quickly scale your server(s) to support any number of users.
This is not a one-size-fits-all operation. Once we understand your needs, we’ll have our system architect put together a proposed configuration. After we agree on the configuration, we’ll work with you to establish a migration plan and timeline.
We can get you moved within a few days of setting a move date. We can handle 100% of the work offline, allowing you to continue working on your current server. We’ll install your programs, set up the VPN, the printers and scanners, and move your data for you. The next step is to have a few users test it out. Open your largest files. Scan and print from all of your programs. Once you confirm the setup is complete, we’ll schedule an outage to take a final backup of the data and transfer it. We want users off during this final incremental backup, so nothing changes while we move the final backup of data. This final backup/restore can usually be done in a couple of hours, and typically we schedule it to happen over a weekend or evening.
We’ve performed these migrations for clients during the busy tax season with minimal disruption. Once they see the performance improvement, they’re ready to move ASAP.
Average migration takes 24 hrs for a 10-person firm with less than 500GB of data. It depends on the number of programs we need to install and the ease of accessing your current data. We’ll give you an estimate once we review your current environment.
Never transfer data, email, or login credentials without the use of a Secure Tunnel like VPN or ZTNA (Zero Trust Network Access).
Accessing a cloud server requires that traffic flows from your private office (or home) network, over the insecure internet, and finally through the cloud private network. If your office (home) connection to the cloud server is not secure, a bad actor could watch and capture that traffic as it flows over the insecure internet. VPN provides a secure tunnel through which your traffic flows, so that even if someone is watching the traffic, they cannot read it because everything flowing through that tunnel is encrypted.
Furthermore, a “full-time VPN” between your office and the cloud server allows your office printers to also communicate with the server and vice versa. It provides faster printing over the VPN vs through the RDP redirected printer protocol. It also allows you to scan directly from your printer/scanner to the server or document management system.
VPN or ZTNA provides a second level of protection required to connect to your server. To access the server, someone must first bypass the VPN login credentials (certificate, login, and 2FA) and then navigate past the Microsoft Windows credentials, which are also protected with 2FA.
We’ll first back up all of your data from UltraTax, Practice CS, FileCabinet, and any other programs you’re running on VO. We’ll request the database backups from Thomson Reuters, but we can perform the others ourselves. The database backups from Thomson Reuters can take a few days, so coordination is key.
We’ll restore that data to your new server on the same day. We’ll have you test the new server with the data we transferred and then schedule a go-live date.
You can work in VO while we do the initial transfer. Then, before the go-live date, we’ll schedule a quick outage (typically 2-4 hours) to get the last backup off VO and onto the new server.
It’s not a difficult task; we need to coordinate it with you and Thomson Reuters.
We’ve completed the transfer without downtime; we just need to coordinate the data changes. We’ll have you work on VO until we transfer all the data, then move you to the new server, where you can continue working while we transfer the remaining “changed” data from VO.
Our basic fully managed plan, which is sufficient for most firms, is $150/user per month. That’s a FULLY MANAGED environment where our engineers maintain the server hardware, operating system, backups, networking, connectivity issues, security, and system updates at no additional charge. This plan is sufficient for most accounting firms, and the environment is guaranteed to support all of your programs and provide the performance you are looking for. We’ll set up a VPN for you, and your firm will be hosted on dedicated server hardware, using state-of-the-art U.3 storage and 4.3Ghz processors.
Don’t worry about server sizing and pre-selecting memory, disk space, and CPU- we’ll make sure your server always has the resources to handle all of your programs and users without slowdowns. No other firms will share your server hardware.
If you’re a small firm or the only user looking for just a single cloud desktop that will run all of your programs, a place where you can store all of your data, accessible from anywhere, secure, and fully maintained by our engineers, the cost is $130/mo.
Some firms have special requirements, and we can handle all of those, too. We offer several high-availability and data storage options to meet the needs of every accounting firm. We offer these as add-ons because some firms don’t require them. Contact us and we’ll be happy to discuss your needs and offer our solution.
Yes. We can work with your existing IT team or provide everything. Software and equipment purchases, contract negotiations, cyber-security assessment/consulting/training, installations, user helpdesk, training; nothing is out of bounds.
