MANAGED services
OUTSOURCED SERVICES
Our IT Outsourced Services allow your organisation to stay focused on its core, revenue-generating business functions by taking on your ownership of your IT Service operations.
BENEFITS INCLUDE
- Predictable Monthly Operating Costs
- Reduced Labour Costs
- Flexibility
- Scalability
- Broader Scope of Technical Expertise
- Improved Business Efficiency
FACT
SMBs HAVE FINANCIAL CONSTRAINTS and RESOURCE LIMITATIONS
CAPACITY
LIMITATIONS
When budgetary constraints impact the size of your IT team, it often equates to unmanageable workloads for existing team members, and insufficient personnel to execute all of the processes and activities integral to effective IT Service Management.
CAPABILITY
LIMITATIONS
Budgetary constraints prompt sacrifices to in-house team capability by necessitating the selection of personnel with generalised knowledge and skills over specialised expertise, or by sacrificing experience for affordability.
LIMITATIONS IMPACT
IT SERVICE STRATEGY BREAKDOWN
Insufficient capacity and/or capability forces teams to deviate from best practices, causing significant consequences that amplify over time.
DECLINING SERVICE QUALITY
Service quality and the user experience are directly impacted when IT teams have unmanageable workloads, inadequate technical knowledge, and gaps in their expertise.
DIMINISHING IT STRATEGIC VALUE
Value from IT Service Strategy dwindles as IT teams are forced to primarily focus on minimising the impact to day-to-day business activities and service outages (BAU).
INCREASED RISK
Resource limitations introduced unnecessary risk to organisations by increasing the likelihood of overlooked regulatory compliance and inadequate security.
IN-HOUSE CHALLENGES
Financial constraints resulting in capacity and capability limitations will impact all areas of IT Service Management (Service Strategy, Service Design, Service Transition, Service Operation, Continual Service Improvement), and create numerous challenges.
SMBs operating in-house IT teams will typically experience:
Challenges can include:
- Expensive and time-consuming staff hiring and training processes;
- HR or Executive Members without the necessary IT background to effectively judge qualifications and experience of IT personnel being hired;
- New hires not meeting expectations; and
- Difficulties addressing knowledge and/or skills gaps in IT Managers who may have been hired for their technical and operational capabilities but lack the expertise necessary for effective execution of vital IT Management processes, such as:
- Strategy Management
- Financial Management
- Demand Management
- Service Level Management
Challenges can include:
- Capable IT Managers who are struggling to manage their in-house teams due to their demanding workloads;
- An inability to determine the effectiveness of IT teams stemming from HR/Executive Members not having the IT background necessary to conduct meaningful performance evaluations for IT personnel; and
- An inability to identify persistent IT issues that could be readily resolved through training or process improvements.
For organisations with on-peak and off-peak business cycles, managing IT demand with fixed resources like personnel and infrastructure means their business will likely experience
- Financially inefficient capacity surpluses, or
- Capacity deficits that negatively impact core business activities.
Fixed capabilities in-house can also impede the adoption of beneficial new technologies that could address evolving business requirements.
Scalability challenges present as delays or impediments to business growth.
These challenges can include:
- Delays in IT infrastructure investment while securing necessary capital; or
- Significant costs and delays associated with scaling-up IT Support for in-house teams of a fixed size with a fixed scope of expertise.
SOLUTION: OUTSOURCED SERVICES
Service Desk
Delivering 1st, 2nd, and 3rd line support, our Service Desk offers a simplified end-user experience by serving as the single-point-of-contact for all incidents, problems, and service requests.
Behind the scenes, our Outsourced Services take responsibility for all Service Operation processes as well as key elements of the ongoing management of your infrastructure.
Service Operation
Request Fulfillment acknowledges and processes service requests from users dealing with standard changes (i.e. password change requests) or requests for information.
Access Management executes information security management policies that serve to safeguard your business data and services from being accessed by unauthorized users.
Access Management:
- Grants requests for access to services, service groups, data, or functions if they are entitled to that access
- Responds to requests for changing access rights or restricting access
- Ensures rights being provided are not improperly used
In the case of an unexpected event impacting users or the business, Incident Management aims to categorise, prioritise, and assign incidents to appropriate technicians so they can be resolved as quickly as possible.
Incidents in an IT environment can be categorised by urgency and severity of impact on users or the business.
Typically, minor incidents impact a single user or a department while major incidents impact the entire organisation by affecting business-critical services.
Event Management provides a means for the early detection of incidents which helps reduce issue response times thereby minimising business impact.
Configuration Items (CIs) are components that need to be managed in order to deliver their function or service. Detected changes to the status of CI are termed “events’ as they can impact the management of an IT infrastructure or the delivery of IT service.
Through the continuous monitoring of CIs, events are detected, investigated, and categorised on the basis of severity which then triggers an appropriate level response.
Problems refer to one or more related incidents for which a root cause has yet to be identified.
While Incident Management serves to restore an affected service to its normal state, Problem Management aims to identify and resolve the root cause, thereby preventing the reoccurrence of incidents.
Infrastructure Management
Capacity Management is the process of ensuring your business has adequate IT resources to meet current and future business requirements in a cost-effective manner, by helping to determine your demand for services and how that demand will change over time.
IT Security Management enables businesses to safely operate their applications while protecting business information. It safeguards the entire organisation from technology-based risks to people and processes thereby increasing resilience to cyber attacks.
IT Security Management adheres to regulatory requirements and recommendations like those for
- Establishing and implementing security policies ;
- Enforcing digital and physical security methods such as anti-malware solutions;
- Securing and updating assets and patches;
- Training employees to recognise and react to threats;
- Monitoring traffic and access to your network and other parts of your IT infrastructure; and
- Regularly testing and assessing systems
Service Asset and Configuration Management ensures IT assets required to deliver service are identified, controlled, and maintained. It also ensures information about identified assets as well as configuration records are accurate and reliable.
Release and Deployment Management aims to plan, design, build, test, and deploy new software and hardware components into the live environment with minimal unpredicted impact on the environment, business operations, and IT support teams.
The Change Management process works to optimise business risk when changes to business requirements prompt an IT request for change that could possibly impact service.
The primary goals are to reduce incidents, disruption, and the need to duplicate work by ensuring requests for change are:
- Recorded,
- Evaluated,
- Authorised,
- Prioritised,
- Planned,
- Tested,
- Implemented
- Documented, and
- Reviewed
Knowledge Management serves to improve IT service efficiency by reducing the need to rediscover knowledge through the continuous gathering, analysis, storage, and sharing of knowledge and information as they relate to all IT Service Management areas and processes.
CUSTOMISATION AND ONBOARDING PROCESS
SOLUTION CUSTOMISATION
Every Support Service contract involves tailoring a Service Level Agreement to your environment and requirements. This includes working with you to define the normal service operation parameters for your business and selecting response and/or resolution times that best suit your needs and budget.
TRANSITION PLANNING
Transition planning ensures a smooth transition. It establishes the implementation approach, the roles and responsibilities of each party throughout the various phases, the timelines, and the success criteria for each phase in the onboarding process.
KNOWLEDGE TRANSFER
Capturing information about your environment and toolsets, and documenting knowledge held within your existing suppliers and internal teams are integral to ensuring a successful transition. This phase improves service quality and efficiency upon handover by reducing the need for our Service Desk to rediscover knowledge.
PHASED HANDOVER
In order to mitigate the possibility of your business operations being impacted, the handover of service delivery occurs in phases. We assume contractual responsibility for the delivery of all in-scope services by an agreed-to Service Commencement Date.