Datacentrix centralises support offerings at control centre

Geoff Chandler, business unit manager: outsource at Datacentrix says that the organisation wanted to take more of a predictive and proactive management approach to recognising and resolving issues in order to enhance availability at customer sites.

"We have identified a number of needs within the local marketplace, based on our engagement with customers and knowledge of IT trends. Not only is high availability of critical importance to address business service availability, risk and compliance regulations, but there is also a definite requirement for more proactive monitoring of services and quick fault resolution," Chandler says.

Demand for automation

"In order to attain high IT service availability, companies are looking at moving their services from internal or traditional hosting to the cloud. In addition to this, they are requesting on-demand availability of IT resources without incurring the cost and risk associated with the required infrastructure. There is also greater demand for automation as part of continual service improvement. Based on these requirements, it has become clear that a support environment that is adaptable, flexible and robust is vital to address the ever-changing needs of our clients," he continues.

Datacentrix' monitoring and control centre uses integrated tools for automatic call and problem logging, preventative and proactive remote monitoring and control, as well as auto fault correction. It is supported by an ITIL and business service availability aligned organisational structure. The monitoring team consists of first, second and third line support staff, offering different levels of support, ranging from monitoring to reactive, proactive and preventative or predictive support.

"The new centre offers a plethora of benefits," Chandler explains. "Not only are we able to reduce reactive support calls, increase efficiency and production through auto-healing, we can also drastically improve service level reporting and customer satisfaction, delivering the same quality of service for both day and night shifts."

Services per client are monitored

Aside from always available services, Datacentrix can also provide on-demand provisioning, risk and compliance management facilities, statutory compliance for availability, disaster recovery and information security, and end-to-end service monitoring and reporting.

All monitoring and control centre personnel are situated adjacent to the Datacentrix service desk in order to provide a single view of the managed service environment. Tools are managed through an integration technology that allows for a consolidated view using a big display to monitor performance matrix of the ICT services per client (outsource or non-outsource) and per technology area such as HP, IBM, Microsoft and Cisco. The design is such that it is easy to incorporate additional focused specialists, such as IBM mainframe team, while providing first line support using the general specialists who will be monitoring all environments.

"With the launch of our monitoring and control centre, Datacentrix has committed to providing world class IT services in order to support the ever changing business need of our customers, business competitiveness and leadership in the IT service management space," Chandler concludes.