24 hour support to keep your system functioning

Emergency Response

Vacation Response

After Hours Support and Monitoring

(Story time)

Real Life Scenario

In the spring 2018 the IT person of a specific engineering company was giving a presentation to a group of 30 potential clients. Giving information on exciting and groundbreaking technologies that would propel the company and their clients forward. This scenario is what most CEO's would love to see their technology expert accomplish which is to drive the business forward.

Communication breakdown

What the IT person and the participants did not know was that back on their primary office their storage system had gone down and all of their workers had completely stopped because the system was unresponsive. Nobody could reach the IT person because he had his phone shut off (like a good presenter should) and other co-workers at the meeting didn't want to interrupt the IT person in the middle of the presentation.

So what happened?

When the IT guy had finished with his presentation he was rushed out of the room and made aware of the situation. Shortly after the issue was resolved and everyone was back to work.

A better arrangement

Ideally, what should have happened in this situation is when the main office experienced this major outage they would try to call their primary IT person. In the event that they could not reach that primary IT person they then call the emergency number with confidence that they are receiving an immediate and qualified response.
In addition, there are many other reactive and proactive measures that could have been in place to mitigate this issue before it even happened.

Response plan

What this program is aiming to do is when you call that emergency number you will reach a pool of highly qualified technology professionals that have already become familiar with your system and can respond quickly and effectively.

R.O.I. calculation

In this particular situation. The main office of this engineering company suddenly had 60 people not able to do their jobs. Each of these workers had a billing rate of between $100 and $250 per hour. If we calculate an average of $180 per worker. 60 workers for 2 hours. That is $21,600 of lost revenue for the company. This is just for a single instance. If this happened 3 times a year then lost revenue would be $64,800+.

Vacation Response

Worry points for an IT person while on vacation

Hopefully my servers stay operational.
I hope all my monitoring is working in case there is a problem.
Phone is fully charged in case someone needs to call me.
Laptop is always at my side in case I have to remote in to someone's computer.
Does [location] have cell service and decent internet?
Hope my spouse doesn't yell at me because I'm working on our vacation.
What if someone hacks my system while I'm gone?
Where/When should I check my e-mail every day?
What if something happens during my flight and nobody can reach me.

Success factors for a restful vacation

Monitors are active and functioning.
Having confidence in the people covering me.
My coverage knows my system and is effective at responding to issues.
My people know who to contact (other than me) if they have problems.

After Hours Support and Monitoring

Scenario 1:

Getting text alerts and phone calls at 6:00am saying something is wrong with the system? You reach for your phone bleary eyed and panick hits.

Scenario 2:

You wake up at a normal time with an e-mail in your inbox saying... "Just wanted to let you know your domain controller didn't come back up after a windows update. We rebooted the server and re-applied the update. Everything is good now."

How awesome would that be???

IT people have to sleep too. Wouldn't it be nice if your system was being monitored by confident professionals that handle problems the moment they happen in the middle of the night while you were sleeping? That is what we aim to do.