Becoming a 24/7 company was one of our biggest challenges to date. Due to the required demands within our industry, we felt it was something we needed to do to keep in line with the competition.
There were many ways we could have approached this. We found many MSPs were using tools that made them appear like a 24/7 company, but it wasn’t the case. Using RMM’s (remote management systems) with NOC’s (Network Operations Centers) integrated into them meant that external technicians would pick up tickets that weren’t being covered by the local IT company. This model can work, but if you already have your processes (RMM, PSA’s, and documentation), changing that to fit into somebody else’s system doesn’t always work operationally due to the significant changes across the board and didn’t work for us.
Therefore, we were faced with two options. Employ people in the UK to work full time at our office between 7 pm – 7 am everyday Monday – Sunday. This was an expensive solution and one that would have put us out of business very quickly. Or, use an external company who can come into our current systems and monitor our users 24/7. So, we are happy to announce we will be using RVS IT for our out of hours monitoring going forward. We already had clients who were 24/7 companies, so it was easy to integrate this into their contracts as they were crying out for this level of support. Evolving and growing with your clients is one of the most important things you can do in this world. If you stagnate, you will lose them. However, we had some clients who didn’t see themselves as 24/7, but we did, due to the demands they were putting on us for continual uptime.
You can automate and configure notifications using various tools these days. We use Kaseya for our centralised control panel for all our servers and client workstations for tasks like this. It’s like our bible and something all our technicians access every day. The only issue with that is our technicians must sleep. So this is where having an outsourced NOC adds value to our company, as issues are now being dealt with when we are sleeping, and because we use Kaseya BMS, any updates or changes are logged so we can see everything that has happened overnight when we wake the next day.
This gives our clients peace of mind that their systems and infrastructure have continual uptime. This applies to on-premise or cloud servers, client computers, firewalls and switches, and even irregular network activity using proactive monitoring tools. One area that always gets raised with this model is security, so we have an NDA’s and we have regular audits for the for all our clients and with RVS-IT.
If you feel you come under the scope for 24/7 proactive monitoring or support, please contact me on 0161 428 2088 or d.forrester@ccsitsolutions.com for more information.
Written by Daniel Forrester
Managing Director
CCS IT Solutions Ltd
