Managed Services & IT Support

  • Guaranteed immediate responsiveness & resource availability

  • Cost control – fixed rates, Opex protection against cost blow-outs

  • Proactive IT management with SLA’s

  • IT Operations Management

  • IT Support & Systems Administration

  • Unlimited scope of works with unlimited hours

  • Monitoring & reporting

IT Managed Services
What Managed Services do we offer?
Our Approach
MSP vs FTE
Options & Charges
IT Support & Systems Administration
Monitoring & Reporting

IT Managed Services

Whether you’re looking for an IT business partner to manage all or part of your IT services or just looking for reliable, trustworthy systems engineers – we have the depth and breadth of technical expertise

Benefits of a managed services engagement:

  • Guaranteed immediate responsiveness & resource availability

  • Focus on preventative & proactive rather than remediation & reactive

  • “All you can eat” full service IT management with unlimited hours

  • Cost control – fixed rates, Opex protection against cost blow-outs

  • Unlimited scope of works for support, management & value add services

  • Assurance you will be prioritised as a VIP Managed Services customer with SLA’s

  • Significantly discounted rates for Cloud, Hosting, ISP & Voice services

What Services are included in a Managed Services engagement?

IT Operations Management

Experienced Cloud engineers to manage your Public, Private or Hybrid Cloud IaaS, including vendors, Datacentre, Cloud Servers & Applications

We deliver and maintain quality IT operations, reporting on key operational excellence metrics, including incident and problem management, service delivery, capacity management and key optimisation initiatives

Expertise with all aspects of Systems, Server and End User administration, support and maintenance … also see (link to IT Support & Systems Admin

Quality Network engineering covering LAN, WAN, ISP, VPN, WiFi, QoS, Remote Access, High Availability, Load Balancing, Routing, performance tuning and bandwidth & content management

Our Networks management includes monitoring, reporting, preventative maintenance, upgrades, capacity management

Expert Server engineers who proactively monitor, alert and report on essential hardware, hypervisor and server services including preventative maintenance

All aspects of Server performance optimisation, high availability clusters and all flavours of Linux and Windows Server operating systems

Management of all PC’s and end user services including PC security, performance tuning, refresh, upgrades, patching and maintenance

End user application support, application delivery, version controls, licensing management and software compliance

Internet service management and monitoring from guys who work at an ISP

Cloud PBX, VoIP and SIP trunk management of your Voice services from guys who work at a VoIP provider

We take ownership of your web and email hosting services, domain name registration and DNS record changes for your Internet services

Includes website changes, upgrades and patching, CMS and plug-in updates, website & web hosting performance, email account adds, moves and changes & spam protection

Owners of your backup Infrastructure including reporting, optimising, scheduling backups and restore testing, retention policy, archiving and offsite data management

Experienced MySQL & MS SQL database engineers to monitor, maintain and manage your mission critical database Infrastructure

End to end management of your web development and application development projects including functional requirements, UX and front end design, application security, performance and systems integration

IT Professional Services Management

Owners of IT strategic direction including creation and implementation of IT roadmaps, identification and implementation of cost out opportunities and IT risk mitigation – developing IT risk avoidance programmes and elimination of single points of failure

Additional strategic offerings include Compliance with PCI, licensing and audits, ITIL process management and LEAN / Six Sigma expertise and consultancy

Our Security Operations Management covers Cloud to the Desktop and includes Network, Perimeter & Firewall, IPS & IDS and Vulnerability scanning

Our Security Consultation includes current state risk assessment, developing security strategies and end user education

Our BC solutions include regular testing and optimisation of automated failover services & manual restore processes

We utilise best practice DR implementations to achieve customer RPO’s and RTO’s (recovery point objectives and recovery time objectives)

Managing your IT deployments, rolling out new systems or upgrades or implementing a new application … we’ve got years of Service Delivery expertise to ensure a smooth transition or integration

We have qualified project management staff to manage your IT project or programmes of work

Change control provides key stakeholders with visibility of the change including business impact and affected IT services, time frames, change owner, change implementers risks, rollback plans, communications plans, technical dependencies, technical tasks, sequence of events and overall professionalism and accountability for implementing IT changes

IT infrastructure and asset lifecycle programme management includes asset refresh, firmware upgrades, version controls, patching schedules and functionality enhancements for all hardware, platforms, appliances and toolsets

Vendors, including us need to be held to account … we can manage your multiple IT vendors providing 1 single point of ownership and accountability as well as being skilled at negotiation of IT Contracts and Services

Our Approach to a Managed Services Engagement

A typical Managed Services engagement includes the following summarised phases

Phase 1 – Define

Audit … current state assessment, tackling any immediate operational issues and defining operational effectiveness metrics from which we can be measured on goals and progress

Phase 2 – Measure / Analyse

Risk … identify IT risks, assess IT security posture, business continuity gaps and define success criteria

Assess … measure Infrastructure and systems performance capability and suitability
Document … develop IT service catalogue, IT service portfolio, capturing inventory, documenting IT processes and establishing key vendor relationships
Visibility … create proactive monitoring and alerting dashboards
Rhythm … establish operating rhythm, health checks, repeatable tasks and IT processes

Phase 3 – Improve

Roadmap … develop strategic IT roadmaps – based on business direction and management input

De-risk … risk mitigation initiatives – create business cases and project deliverables
Maintenance … develop an IT Lifecycle programme, maintenance activities, refresh, upgrade, patching cycles and asset management
Process improvement … deliver on IT simplification and IT process improvement initiatives

Phase 4 – Control

Review … monthly reviews with key stakeholders reporting on performance and deliverables

Report … develop reporting stack for Infrastructure health, IT support issues and requests and progress tracking on optimisation opportunities, project status and IT priorities

Managed Services Charges vs Full Time Employee Comparison

Whilst the market value for an intermediate systems engineer and a senior systems engineer command different salaries the reality is that most mid-size businesses require at least 2- 3 IT staff … this is dictated by skill-set requirements and not necessarily workload

IT has such a broad scope of service offerings these days so even the best engineers are only technically proficient in around 30 – 40% of IT … not their fault, it’s not humanly possible to skilled in all aspects of IT. Example – a strong systems engineer may know Servers, Storage and hardware very well but it’s very unlikely they’d also be skilled in VoIP, Cloud, Security or Networking and most certainly not have Development, managerial or IT strategy expertise

This scenario is like your GP doctor … they provide general support but make recommendations to specialists when more specialised expertise is required. It is for exactly this reason that enterprise IT teams are segmented into their own technical specialities and can include dozens or hundreds of staff

Partnering with us for IT Managed Services and Support solves this challenge … you get the full spectrum of technical, managerial and strategic expertise without the salaries of several in-house headcount. Additionally, the technical capabilities we provide is highly likely to exceed that of your in-house staff

Leveraging the value and expertise of a whole Managed Services team is the way to go as we assign specific ownership to those technically proficient in that area of expertise

Commercially, the full time employee’s option doesn’t stack up … but it is common that we partner with an existing IT department to fill those gaps where they don’t have the in-house expertise

Managed Services Options & Charges

IT Operations Management

Our IT Operations Management is not all about break / fix – it’s about delivering and maintaining quality IT operations. It focuses on defining and reporting on operational excellence metrics including incident and problem management, capacity management and service delivery

To ensure Management teams have visibility of their IT services we provide dashboards highlighting the health of IT services, priorities and the status of key deliverables

IT Support & Systems Administration

STROBE cover all aspects of IT Support, Systems Administration, Networking Services and End User Computing

Our IT Support offering can include any of the services highlighted in Managed Services

Support & Systems Administration generally refers to day to day operational requests such as:

  • Server Administration

  • Active Directory administration

  • End user support

  • Maintenance break / fix

  • Application support

  • Infrastructure upgrades

  • PC upgrades & optimisation

ITIL Service Management

ITIL (IT Infrastructure Library) is an industry standard framework for IT Service Management

If you’re looking to adopt a mature, professional and best practice approach to IT Service Management then give us a call to discuss ITIL … we have ITIL certified staff who love this stuff

    Monitoring & Reporting Management

Monitoring

You get what you measure – well, we measure everything

Monitoring is a Mission Critical application in our business … we believe it should be in every business

Our Monitoring Management includes monitoring, alerting & reporting on key performance metrics with countless customisable triggers and thresholds for both proactive and reactive monitoring of hardware, systems and services

Monitoring provides data and in-depth logs for analysis, troubleshooting and support but it also enables data driven decisions which drive improvement actions

We offer well over 1000 custom monitoring triggers … below are a few common examples:

CPU, Memory, I/O, Latency, Response times, Load times, Servers, Hypervisors, Operating Systems, Databases, Applications, Interfaces, bandwidth, transaction times

Drives capacity planning and forecasting on all IT systems and services

Alerting on critical hardware … SSD’s, Hard Drives, Systems performance degradation

Brute force, DDoS, IPS, Web Servers, RDP, Antivirus

Alerting on Servers, Networks and all IT Infrastructure  … up / down & operational health status

Catching services that require renewals before they expire … SSL Certificates, Domain names, subscriptions etc

Alerts for end of life services, end of support, changes of standards, new versions … eg. eCommerce Security and non-compliant software

Alerting is what gets an engineer out of bed at 3am to ensure a failed IT service is restored before the start of the business day. Alerting is the output from monitoring triggers determined by performance & availability thresholds

See below for a couple of screenshots of an Apache Thread Scorecard, CPU & Storage from one of our Servers (without the data values) … if this seems like granular data to capture then imagine what levels we can go to monitoring your services

Reporting

Reporting is an output of all that monitoring data … it provides summarised visibility of IT operational health and performance to key stakeholders. The data is simplified, structured and reported in a presentable manner that can be clearly understood

Reporting provides compelling data demonstrating IT utilisation trends to aid with planning and forecasting future demand

Reporting results in unambiguous, evidence based discussions on improvement initiatives, performance opportunities, capacity management and IT investment and budgeting

Monitor > Report > Analyse > Decide … that’s our operating rhythm. If that sounds like something you’re missing then let’s discuss your options

FAQ’s

We start with an audit to identify any immediate risks and to ensure we’ve got a full understanding of your environment. From there we propose a detailed programme of work highlighting key objectives and milestones

We provide monthly reports to track our priorities, incident and problem management, project status, key IT risks and deliverable

We believe in flexibility for our customers and don’t consider contracts provide any customer benefit. We back ourselves to do a great job rather than leaning on a contract

A Managed Service Provider (MSP) is an outsourced third-party company that manages and assumes the responsibility of a defined set of IT and technology management services to its customers. It is a strategic method of improving operations that is commonplace among large corporations as well as small and medium-size businesses

Absolutely, that’s the idea with our IT Support service compared to Managed Services. You can use us for ad hoc support as and when required

Service Portfolio       

Multiple Services, 1 Service Provider … how can we help you today?

TALK WITH AN EXPERT TODAY

0508 2CLOUD 09 366 0878 Chat sales@strobe.net.nz

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