Head of Managed Service Product Management Liz Shaw discusses the benefits of enlisting help from network experts who can ensure your everyday operations run smoothly
So you’re currently running and managing a complex network environment made up of wired and wireless networks for your staff, guests and customers; a network in your data centre and a top layer of network security to keep your data safe. Sound familiar?
Juggling business demands, ever-changing user needs, a complex technical solution delivered within diverse infrastructure, and time-managing your resources is not easy. When things go wrong, or there are big projects on the go such as migrations and upgrades, your valuable time can often be hijacked. You find yourself working on all-encompassing projects, reacting to incidents and worrying about security threats when your time could be better spent on what you do best – driving your business forward. Now considered responsibilities of the modern IT professional, you should be driving digital transformation and improving productivity and efficiency whilst driving down cost.
Maybe you have a break-fix contract? Or maybe your local area network (LAN) is part-managed by a service provider? Whether this is the case or not, here we spell out the benefits of enlisting help from experts to proactively maintain the network for you, and why these benefits outweigh the outdated and productivity-sapping approach of reactive maintenance-only contracts or managing LAN solely in-house.
The challenges with purely reactive services
Basic maintenance services can be limiting. Agreements tend to have little intelligence applied around incident priority as hardware is all lumped together in a ‘one size fits all’ contract. Understanding the impact of a failure is a very reactive process which only takes place once the pain is already being felt by your users.
To maintain the necessary support for your business, you need to have a round-the-clock on-call resource that manages the lifecycle of all incidents at any hour without missing a beat (or getting much sleep), ready to resume business as usual (BAU) tasks the following morning. The pressure is always on to ensure appropriate cover for sickness and holidays too.
But surely there must be an easier way? Here are some additional management models which can overlay your existing break-fix and make you more proactive when managing your LAN:
Customer-led with expert assistance
For mid to large-scale organisations, you may have already built a capable support team who manage your LAN environment in-house. However, that team may occasionally be stretched to support the demands of your business or hit the ceiling of their skillset for a particularly tricky problem.
Daisy’s Essentials level support provides proactive access to LAN subject matter experts who are experienced in a variety of demanding environments. A team of certified engineers are ready to assist your business with remote technical advice for general guidance, help writing a change, or support an integration activity. We also have the highest-accredited cloud and communication specialists to engage and collaborate with too.
Co-managed
For organisations with internal support teams and the same challenges as customer-led models, our Enterprise support has all the advantages of the Essentials level support with the additional benefit of proactive monitoring and event management.
Monitoring gives IT professionals and their teams visibility of the LAN infrastructure to allow a proactive approach to support with reporting on alerts, availability and applications. With Daisy handling your event management you need not stare at a screen 24/7 waiting for something to happen or throw all resources at an issue which ends up being a false alarm. Our remote management centre will proactively monitor your environment and validate all alerts. Once identified as a service-affecting issue or potentially a service-affecting threat, we will notify you.
Fully-managed
Supporting a LAN environment is challenging, and organisations of all shapes and sizes can find themselves in a situation of having little or no internal technical skills or even have a need to focus efforts on tasks which require internal business knowledge.
Our Enterprise Plus offering provides the maximum level of access to Daisy’s support functions including monitoring, incident management, problem management and changes.
Incidents reported either by your service desk or raised by event management will be managed through to resolution with a fixed service-level agreement (SLA). Our highly experienced service desk team fix 80% of tickets at first contact. Where a more complex issue exists, an escalation is quickly made to subject matter experts. A major incident manager will be assigned to coordinate your Priority 1 (P1) incidents for you.
Daisy have got your changes covered. Tasks such as port configuration, firewall rules, service set identifier (SSID) changes, routing protocol changes and even VPN configuration can be implemented via a service request.
You can be safe in the knowledge that your environment is being monitored and managed, allowing you to fully focus efforts on your own business objectives.
So whether you just want to top up your skills on-site, or you want to let LAN experts handle the grunt work for you, there is an option for each and everything in between.
Speak to one of our experts today, and find out how we can help you get the most out of your LAN investment.