Building A Secure Future with College Success Foundation

Background

College Success Foundation (CSF) is a national non-profit that serves underrepresented students from low socioeconomic families to successfully finish high school, enroll in and graduate from college.

Founded in 2000, CSF serves over 30,000 middle and high school students annually in 12 public school districts in Washington state and the District of Colombia. Additionally, they support several thousand more CSF Scholars in college.

The Story

In 2019, College Success Foundation had a lean IT Team, which resulted in minimum customer support and little time to assist with crucial IT projects and ongoing maintenance. The IT team operated tactically but needed help to overcome the challenges to provide strong user support and a more stable environment. College Success Foundation partnered with ISOutsource to help simplify and protect the IT environment and establish an IT Helpdesk to help address all user technical issues. CSF and ISOutsource worked closely together to implement policies and procedures, creating a roadmap with high, medium, and low-risk objectives and began prioritizing and executing.

After the initial engagement, ISOutsource helped interview IT candidates to bring these capabilities back in-house. CSF’s Vice President of Operations, Rosemary Turner, said, “Back in 2019 it was a challenge competing with Microsoft, Amazon, and Google for IT talent.” Together CSF and ISOutsource have been able to build a proactive IT Team that ensures that CSF is running optimally.

The Result

CSF now has a healthy IT environment with an internal IT department. CSF and ISOutsource are still partners and work closely with the CSF IT staff to provide a strategic vision for the IT department aligned with CSF’s vision. This close partnership has resulted in a stable environment that protects their student’s data and provides redundancy should an unforeseen challenge come to fruition.

Currently, CSF is experiencing growth. Rosemary said, “We are balancing our current growth with long-term initiatives to enhance our infrastructure and improve efficiencies.” In 2023, CSF is focusing on access to integrated and real-time data that will allow CSF to not only tell their story but to track, measure, analyze, and report on their services to understand better where they are and where they need to go to optimize their student services and programs to serve students better.

“ISOutsource is always there to assist us both proactively and strategically as we continue to simplify and digitally transform our IT infrastructure.”

Rosemary Turner

Vice President of Operations

The Future

College Success Foundation’s technology goal continues to simplify, protect, and strengthen its infrastructure by focusing on digital transformations, system and infrastructure improvements, and data and cyber security. This will allow them to scale to serve more students and better support their staff with data, technology, and the processes needed to be efficient, effective, and continuously improve.