Key Results
- Revenue grew from $4M to $40M over eight years, at approximately 30% CAGR
- Headcount expanded from 17 employees to approximately 175
- On-call maintenance windows eliminated for the engineering team
- Hiring shifted to service-focused specialists, removing the staffing imbalance that had created internal friction
- New client onboarding now scales on demand, with no procurement cycle or storage planning required
- Migrated a 300-person organization and its 300 on-premises servers into a fully managed, compliant cloud environment
About Charles IT
Charles IT is a Connecticut-based managed service provider focused exclusively on high-compliance industries: manufacturing, healthcare, and financial services. Their clients include defense contractors navigating CMMC certification, healthcare providers managing sensitive patient data under HIPAA, and financial services firms subject to FFIEC and SEC oversight.
The Challenge
For nearly a decade, Charles IT ran its own data center. What started as a closet full of equipment purchased on eBay matured into co-located physical hardware, but a core problem persisted: maintaining a data center required dedicated specialists whose skills didn’t translate to client work. VMware experts and SAN engineers were carrying full-time titles without full-time billable workloads, while service technicians ran call after call. The imbalance created friction inside a culture built on shared accountability.
Hardware failures meant emergency trips to New Jersey. Server rotations and patch cycles ran at 2:00 a.m. When COVID froze hiring and then unlocked a talent market where engineers could name their price, holding onto that specialized staff became even harder.
Instead of focusing on our clients, we were doing our own data center. I believe in buying what you aren’t an expert in and letting somebody else deal with that.
Foster CharlesCEO of Charles IT
The Solution
Charles IT moved to Nexcess Platform through a full lift-and-shift of their data center environment. Nexcess handles the physical hardware and hosting; Charles IT retains control of networking and backups. For a company serving highly regulated clients, Nexcess’s compliance posture was a deciding factor. Foster had already worked with Nexcess on website hosting and noticed their HIPAA-compliant credentials, which put them in the running when the larger data center decision came around.
The transition paced itself around client readiness, not technical constraints. Some clients moved immediately; others required walkthroughs and updated agreements before their data moved.
The relationship was tested early. Two significant outages hit within the first few months. What held things together was consistent access: the same Nexcess engineers who handled the first issue were on the second one, with full context and no re-explanation required. Charles IT stayed in.
“We doubled down on the relationship. It’s been rock solid since.”
Foster Charles
CEO of Charles IT
Looking ahead
Charles IT is expanding through New England and into compliance-dense markets in Norfolk, Virginia and Huntsville, Alabama, with further growth through acquisition. Any company they bring on that runs its own data center becomes a straightforward migration. “I can focus on the new clients, the new team members, the new stack,” Foster said. “Not the data center. Stick to what you’re good at.”
