Services

Proactive support is a key part of our support.  Our IT support focuses on issue avoidance, service optimization, and improved system performance.  There are several aspects that are included with proactive support.

o Scheduled Preventative Maintenance – Routine maintenance keeps systems available and stable. This is one of our main elements in providing proactive support. This proactive approach allows us to prevent problems from happening rather than reacting to issues after the fact. This minimizes the disruption to your environment, increases your staff’s productivity, and reduces your overall costs.

o Key Application Maintenance – Nowadays, applications are not just standalone but are client-server, distributed, and cloud-based. This complexity makes understanding how applications are supposed to work extremely important. We monitor your key applications to ensure their availability for business operations. We monitor the infrastructure, errors, application logs, and resource utilization. This allows us to understand how your applications work and detect issues before they impact your users.

o Optimization – In optimizing your environment, we ensure all devices are working within key performance thresholds. We continuously fine-tune your devices to ensure that they perform at an optimal level. Our proactive monitoring alerts us to situations that fall outside the bounds of the optimum thresholds set.

o Asset Management – With our Asset Management solution, you know what is and should be in your environment. We provide regular scans of your environment and report on assets by hardware manufacturer, model, operating system, or even by location. We also provide warranty information.

o Configuration Management – Configuration Management allows for quick deployment of equipment through automated asset discovery and configuration based on pre-defined templates. We can also quickly update configuration information when changes are needed or respond to unauthorized changed to equipment.

o Performance Monitoring – Performance Monitoring measures key performance metrics to ensure that your environment is stable. We monitor a wide range of metrics, including disk space, memory utilization, CPU usage, and availability. Again, our proactive monitoring alerts us to metrics that fall outside our thresholds for optimal performance.

Security is more than just anti-virus, and it is not enough to think of it as set-and-forget. A true security solution employs layered security or defense-in- depth and requires constant monitoring followed up by timely, appropriate responses. The overall Security Management offering includes the entire network from the network-facing equipment down to the end user equipment and education. 

o Firewall Management – Firewalls are a key element in network security. They must be provisioned, deployed, upgraded, and patched appropriately to keep up with the latest threats and prevent breaches. Firewalls are also monitored for configuration changes and intrusion attempts. Events and threats identified through our monitoring receive an immediate response to neutralize the threat.

o Patch Management – Every device needs to have updates/patches applied regularly to ensure that vulnerabilities are not exploited. One of the easiest ways for hackers to breach networks is by attacking vulnerabilities of out-of-date software. Patches are centrally managed and delivered to endpoints on a set schedule. This is done for Microsoft and 3rd Party applications. Vigilant patching reduces the risk of major attacks, such as WannaCry and Petya.

o Managed Anti-Virus – The anti-virus solution provides protection for workstations and servers. Centrally deployed and managed, we use traditional signature-based scanning to defend against malware threats based on the most up-to-date virus definitions. This scanning is supplemented by rules-based scanning to detect programs and files that act like viruses, protecting you from undiscovered malware.

o Managed Mail – The Managed Mail solution protects against phishing, malware, and other email-borne threats. It provides spam filtering, anti-virus protection, and mailbox continuity. The spam filtering not only collects suspected spam but allows end users to blacklist unsafe emails and whitelist non-spam emails. Mailbox continuity ensures that your emails are not lost even during an email server outage. The email archiving option protects critical business information and intellectual property, helping to ensure availability and chain-of-custody in the event of legal proceedings. 

o Managed Audit – Understanding your risks is one thing, we take it farther than just identifying risks. We help to associate concrete, actionable data with these vulnerabilities. We perform monthly vulnerability and PCI DSS scans to identify data at-risk, personally identifiable information (PII), and primary account numbers (PAN) and provide reports that communicate the risks as financial impact.

o End-user Education – One of the most important aspects of security is its practice. This means that users must understand and practice proper security measures. This proposal includes educating users on proper security measures. 

Traditional IT consultants provide technology recommendations with a technology impact assessment--cost, disruption, and benefits of the technology itself. With the vCIO role, we take a broader view than the traditional IT consultant, focusing on business and IT alignment. We help with strategic planning, budgeting, and reworking business processes.