Zebec's Broad Spectrum of Managed Services

The “managed service spectrum” is a term we use to discuss the level of detail and responsibility that Zebec will take for the day to day maintenance and operating of its clients IT environment. In most cases, we find that a small to medium business would rather not invest time in maintaining all aspects of a healthy IT infrastructure and would prefer to spend more time focusing on their core business. However, there are often some individuals with technical expertise within the organization who require some degree of responsibility and/or management for the overall IT environment. As a result, our goal is to work closely with our customers to understand exactly what areas they can not or do not want to maintain in the IT arena and to customize our service level offerings to augment internal staff and cover any areas of weakness that may exist.

What exactly does this mean? Well, that depends. Since each customer is different, each managed service spectrum will paint an entirely different picture. For one client, we may take responsibility for maintaining network connectivity, VPN connectivity and maintaining backups. For another client, we may take responsibility for full-scale operating system maintenance to include patching, automated reporting, full backup schedule maintenance and testing. For another client, we might have no responsibility other than to monitor the ongoing health of their network and server environments. Therefore, the short answer is Zebec is willing to do whatever the clients asks us to do as long as it remains within our level of professional expertise.

The following list gives a basic high level understanding of what details can be included in a managed service spectrum. This list should not be considered complete as we are often taking on new responsibilities to meet a new clients needs:

• 24/7/365 front line support for routine operational support (reboots, checking for error lights)
• OS Maintenance (Active Directory management and other System Administrator duties)
• SQL Server Management
• Backups and Restores
• Exchange Server Management
• Basic Server monitoring (ICMP & Bandwidth)
• Extended server monitoring (CPU/Disk/Memory/Event logs/OS Patch/etc…)
• Custom monitoring solutions based upon customer expectation
• High speed internet access
• Public IP addresses
• DNS and SSL certificate ordering and management
• Client VPN connections
• Firewall to firewall VPN connections
• Firewall administration
• Basic mail hosting
• Anti-spam/anti-virus services
• Backup dial-up lines for out of band management or emergency access
• Telecommunications monitoring and proactive response
• Network equipment management (routers, switches, WAN lines, etc….)

Outside of these routine operational responsibilities, Zebec provides access to highly knowledgeable staff that can assist in planning and implementation for more detailed and involved projects, such as DR planning, platform migrations, alternative technology analysis, etc. Since these opportunities are usually unique, it would be very difficult to provide even a basic list in this area. If you have a business problem that can be solved or is in some way related to technological or data center facility based solutions, we appreciate the opportunity to work with our clients as partners to provide professional assistance with these tasks.