Managed Service with a Difference—the Preventive Angle!

Managed service providers take over the maintenance and administrative tasks from clients and ensure the smooth running of IT systems. This allows businesses to focus on critical things that have a larger impact such as innovating to launch new products and services, expanding business into new geographies or developing manpower. IT becomes an enabler helping business achieve critical goals instead of weighing down with heavy investments and performance issues. This is the most obvious value proposition of managed services.

Yet, drill a little deeper and you realize quality of managed service has significantly more impact in enhancing productivity. This is because each time IT snag occurs, the loss of productivity down the line results in formidable business consequences. Not to mention the irreparable damage to the brand and customer experience when critical applications experience downtime. Therefore, managed service should not just focus on manning operations but take preventive measures to avoid downtime.

A hallmark of our managed services at Umbrella Infocare has been to focus on preventive activities—understand business and IT challenges and proactively take measures to prevent downtime. And a critical benchmark of our service is the reduction in the number of calls that customer makes as a result of those preventive measures.
For example, one of our customers—which is one of the largest legal firms in the country—had a Citrix XenApp deployment and was experiencing frequent downtime with more than 40-50 calls per day. Umbrella was hired to take over the management of the entire XenApp farm.

Umbrella rolled out its services in phases. In the first phase the focus was on stabilizing the deployment which was achieved by a combination of onsite presence and remote monitoring and management. After stabilizing the infrastructure, Umbrella put in place a mechanism for daily, weekly and monthly tasks to keep the system stable. This was accompanied by installing regular system updates and modifying policies to facilitate business objectives. This has resulted in 90 percent reduction in number of calls and significant improvement in user satisfaction.

Umbrella is now focusing on upgrading the environment and further stabilizing the Xen environment. With more than 50 managed services customers, we focus on introducing practices that will eliminate downtime instead of troubleshooting after an incident occurs, even as we continuously learn, improvise and implement our innovation as a company.