Things to Know About Managed Network Services

What is Managed Network Services?

Managed Network Services is a comprehensive set of integrated tools and capabilities to provide Management support for network infrastructure, network connectivity, data center infrastructure, WAN/LAN infrastructure, Wi-Fi, SD-WAN, SASE, IP telephony, Security and Applications that exist on the Wide Area Network.

 

What are the components of Managed Network Services?

The components of Managed Network Services include a comprehensive set of integrated tools and capabilities to provide Proactive Monitoring support, Automated Ticketing for incident management, Level 1 through Level L3 engineering support team resources for triage and troubleshooting to resolve incidents, Performance Metrics Reporting, Synthetic Transactions, Continual Service Improvement, Problem Resolution, Change Management, Knowledge Base Management, Patching, and Release Management for firmware upgrades.

 

Do I need Managed Network Services?

Every enterprise organization or business needs a Wide Area Network with underlying infrastructure to support native or cloud applications to operate the business and deliver a unique customer experience. Support of that Infrastructure is needed whether done internally or leveraging a Managed Service Provider in order to ensure the infrastructure is available, high performing, configured correctly, and supported appropriately in order to resolve issues that occur over time.

 

What problem does Managed Network Services solve?

Managed Network Services (MNS) solves the modern-day challenge of managing and supporting mission critical network and data center infrastructure that requires maximum performance and uptime for organizations to operate 24x7x365. Organizations can make the choice to build and provide these management and support functions in-house or leverage a Managed Services Provider to either assist or completely outsource the entire operation. Without Managed Network Services, organizations run the risk of delivering a poor customer and end user experience when accessing applications to perform daily operations. The negative outcomes of not having a MNS solution can result in loss of revenue, loss of critical data, and loss of brand name reputation.

 

What are the benefits of Managed Network Services?

The benefits of Managed Network Services include 24/7 proactive support, greater network and data center infrastructure performance and uptime, scalable and repeatable support processes to maximize productivity and efficiency, the ability to drive continual service improvement through measuring KPI’s and performance metrics trends to help better design and configure the Wide-Area-Network, and the ability to free up high skilled resources to focus on technology innovation versus “keeping the lights” on.

 

What are the best Managed Network Services solutions?

There are many types of Managed Network Services solutions. The best solutions consist of a complete, comprehensive approach to be able to monitor across all devices, connectivity, and applications within the Wide Area Network that includes a fully integrated suite of tools and capabilities to automate and streamline support and management processes proactively. This includes complete visibility and control to correlate KPI’s and performance trends in order to better optimize the design and configuration of the network to maximize uptime, performance, and security.

 

What is Remote Monitoring and Management?

Remote Monitoring and Management is the ability to proactively monitor network devices, data center devices, and applications in order to ensure they are up and running, performing at a high level, and being maximized to increase productivity and efficiency for customers and end users. In addition, it includes wrapping a full suite of services that include 24×7 Proactive Monitoring support, Automated Ticketing for incident management, Level 1 through Level L3 engineering support team resources for triage and troubleshooting to resolve incidents, Performance Metrics Reporting, Synthetic Transactions, Continual Service Improvement, Problem Resolution, Change Management, Knowledge Base Management, Patching, and Release Management for firmware upgrades.

 

Do I need Remote Monitoring and Management?

Mission critical network and data center infrastructure needs Remote Monitoring and Management to avoid significant downtime and interruption to business operations due to outages or impacting issues with technology infrastructure. The ability to proactively monitor against mission critical thresholds on a given device can help ensure that actions to remediate an issue are taken before it’s too late and small issue becomes a catastrophic issue that results in loss of revenue, loss of data, or negative impact to brand name recognition.

 

How do you implement Managed Network Services?

To implement Managed Network Services, an initial assessment of the network and data center infrastructure is required to fully define and understand the scope of the solution. Once the appropriate solution is determined along with Service Level Agreements to meet the customer need, then typically a 60 – 90 day transition period is kicked off to do key transition functions like stand up the customer environment, establish secure remote access and connectivity to the infrastructure in scope, set up the monitoring server, turn on monitoring and verify all devices are captured and visible within the monitoring systems, establishment of standard policies and procedures, communication and process flow, escalation paths, training, go live, and early hyper care and feeding post go live.