A Managed Server: Saving Time and Money

Among many services provided as part of the Managed Server offering, we provide database management service.  Recently, one of our clients made a change to a big shared database to find out that product prices shown after this change were from two years ago.  All of the sudden, products were sold at old prices at multiple store locations.  The database was pulling thousands of wrong pricing fields.  In the meantime, our client could not sell anything because of inaccurate data causing their pricing and inventory levels to be off.

 

Our team stepped in and solved this problem within couple of minutes.  All we needed to know was when the change that off set the database occurred. Considering that we conduct hourly backups, we were able to restore the database to previous state and restart the server in order to reverse the corruption.  All of their data was restored to the correct state and their stores were able to continue with their operations. Had this not been the case, they would have to fix prices manually which would have taken a long period of time.  Ultimately, the corruption would have caused a long business interruption causing a loss revenue and unhappy customers.

Managed Services: Helping Our Clients Do What They Do Best

Our Managed Services provide powerful, flexible technology that supports our client's business specific IT needs and budgets.  For one of our clients, our team acts as an outsourced IT department, managing their technology without choking their budget.

Our client has a high transaction volume business, and having the transaction system down will cause significant business interruption.  Before we stepped in, our client's employees who are located throughout the United States, would reach out to their own IT support contact.  This contact was pretty much anybody who could fix the problem.  This method of support was wasting valuable employee time. When we stepped in, we set up a triage system between our client's employees, their vendors, and our team.  When a problem emerges, our client's employees can call in our support team who opens a ticket, and directs it to the appropriate vendor to make sure the problem gets resolved quickly.  In this way, our client is able to continue to run their operations without business disruption.  For example, a store might have a generalized credit card transaction problem.  There are a lot of dependencies with the transaction system for it to work properly.  The problem might be that the Point of Sale (POS) application is not working properly, the computer itself, the software on the computer, a hardware issue, the Firewall, or the Internet connection itself.  Someone who manages the store would not actually be able to identify the problem without investing a lot of time.  When an issue occurs, what they know is that system is down and as a result, they are unable to continue their operation.  By calling into call center to do vendor triage, we take the burden off of the store manager so he or she is able to focus on operations rather than trying to diagnose and resolve these system problems.  

Some of the challenges we faced in implementing this system was that it was hard to change old habits.  Some employees continued to use the usual go to IT help person near them to help fix the issue.  Over time they realized that this method usually ended up taking longer.  We addressed this issue speaking at our client’s annual conference where we introduced ourselves, how we work with their vendors, and went through general user training.  At the beginning, our client's employees were skeptical, most of them had previous unpleasant, unresponsive, and frustrating IT experiences.  We stood apart from their previous IT relationships, by stressing training and education.  We also ensured that users know how to leverage our other services to become as efficient as possible.  We know that first impressions are important, and we are focused on responsiveness of our service  during the ramp up phase which can sometime be challenging with new systems and procedures.  This is just another case of us becoming an extension of the team, something we really enjoy.

Steps to Distater Proofing our Client

Outsourcing IT is beneficial for a company in many ways, I'll highlight two of them.  First of all, the cost of outsourcing the IT is usually about the third of what it would cost internally; and second, by outsourcing IT, a business reduces the risk by getting a support from experienced and efficient team who's combined knowledge would be expensive and time consuming to duplicate.  Therefore, having us constantly monitor your systems, making sure they  are always up and running, and fully-compliant are some of numerous advantages our team can provide for your business.

For one of our clients we implemented a Backup and Disaster Recovery platform during our managed services engagement. One evening one of our client’s core infrastructure servers had hardware failure and the server could not be brought back up.  This critical problem was immediately routed to us for investigation.  It happened late in the evening when most of client employees already went home and were not even aware of a problem that emerged.  Our team managed to turn up the virtual version of that server on our Backup Device.  Next morning when users came back to work they did not know that there was any issue and our client’s business was unaffected.  Had that not been the case the business across five different states would have had experienced 24 to 48 hours of downtime.  This issue could have cost the company more than several hundreds of thousands dollars a day, because it would be impossible to continue with their operations.  By providing a comprehensive Business Continuity Plan, not only did we prevent a loss of productivity from happening, but we also made sure that our client’s customers were not affected.  Our support team helped this company solve their issue quickly and without business interruption.