Norbella Media Agency

The Company

Norbella has been upending Boston's media agency scene for the past ten years, delivering a strategic and consultative approach to all its clients. They work with national and regional client partners, including Cumberland Farms, Carbonite, Boston Symphony Orchestra, Papa Gino's, and many more. They focus on the consumer and how they live their day, coupled with their partner's creative platform to inspire how they recommend going to market. They are sophisticated with all media and plan to drive the best outcome based on their client's goals and objectives. Whether they are planning for Experiential, Mobile, Outdoor, TV, or Programmatic, their work centers on delivering a great product through collaboration and embracing all the opportunities the media and technology world offers. 

Trapped in the Private Cloud

Norbella found themselves in a situation familiar to many SMBs: they wanted to optimize their office environment by limiting on-premise equipment. They moved their digital assets and data to a private cloud via a third-party provider. Unfortunately, despite a promising start, the service quality began to decline. Norbella employees were trying to work around their IT infrastructure rather than thrive through it. They also didn't own their equipment and didn't feel they had adequate control over the company's digital assets. It was at this point that Norbella began to explore opportunities within the public cloud space. 

Their search led them to iCorps' testimonials page, where they discovered that one of their active clients was already leveraging iCorps managed services. Norbella proactively reached out to the shared client, gauging their experience with iCorps and gaining a first-hand look at how a strategic IT partnership has helped them flourish. It was an easy choice after that. 

A Phased Transformation

Norbella embraced a phased approach for their migration from the private to public cloud. Because most of Norbella's employees are client-facing, they needed to ensure there would be no disruption during the transfer. iCorps' technicians took extra time planning an appropriate roadmap to ensure Norbella's employees could operate as usual and their clients would receive the high-quality strategy they expected. By utilizing a tiered approach, Norbella was able to spread its digital transformation systematically and efficiently. 

Over the course of thirty days, iCorps upgraded Norbella's digital ecosystem to ensure they would be able to optimize the Microsoft Office 365 suite. This involved projects such as upgrading all laptops to Windows 10 and migrating employee email to Outlook. Then, their content was moved to OneDrive, with security controls based on conditional access. After the foundation had been set, Norbella's employees were migrated to SharePoint. They received training to optimize their SharePoint understanding and, after their experience with the private cloud provider, have quickly begun capitalizing on the platform's capacity.

Delivering a Better Product

Now, having shifted to Office 365, Norbella is focusing on the "big picture, holistic view" for their company. Their long-term goals are centered on understanding and reducing their exposure, developing a disaster recovery plan, and creating redundancy through a backup internet server. Norbella is also working proactively to ensure that their clients, some of which operate in the European Union, are in a position to thrive amidst GDPR.