Organization Description

Liberty Tax Service is a tax preparation franchise. From its start as Canadian company U&R Tax Depot, Liberty Tax has become an industry leader with a network of over 30,000 tax preparers and almost 16 million individual tax returns prepared.

Problem

Cristin Flick, senior DBA manager at Liberty Tax Service, wore several hats before Solvaria was called in to help. She was acting as a database manager and a database administrator while also training and tasking her junior. To relieve the pressure of so many roles and not having higher-level DBAs, Cristin reached out to the executive team about bringing in Solvaria.

"There really isn't any training...it's more information sharing. Having Solvaria allows me to not even think about having to explain what I need them to do - I just tell them what I need them to do"

Solution

Solvaria currently has 4-5 senior-level DBAs working with Liberty Tax that maintain and optimize their databases 24/7. During their busy peak in tax season, Solvaria focuses on monitoring dashboards, making sure all of the systems are up and running and performing optimally to support their tax business. On off seasons, Solvaria works on build-outs and maintenance of Liberty Tax's database environment.

Solvaria's familiarity with Liberty Tax's databases also allows them to efficiently solve issues when they arise as well. Such as, when two different san cashes failed within two hours of eachother during peak tax season, Solvaria:

• Held a call with the different leads and Liberty Tax's CIO to create a remediation plan
  
  • Worked in shifts from Friday evening to Tuesday on a 24/7 conference call line
• Decided to fail over to the Azure disaster recovery site which Solvaria had helped build
• Was familiar with how Liberty Tax's data was flowing and managed to bring everything back online in Azure
• Set up Liberty Tax's environment so the technology failure wasn't noticeable to the public 

"It's the middle of tax season...every minute we're down we're losing money as a business"

Result

Now, Cristin Flick describes Liberty Tax's database environment as "a team of one...plus Solvaria". To watch the testimonial video and learn more about Solvaria's overall impacts for Liberty Tax, follow the link below.