Dimension Data s Uptime Maintenance Service

Dimension Data s Uptime Maintenance Service

The pace of business today simply doesn t allow for downtime. When systems go off-line, productivity drops, time and money go to waste and opportunities are lost. Proactively handling the failures that cause downtime makes resourcing and IT platform investment a vital part of IT maintenance. But investing in leading technology is costly and finding the right skills is a challenge for IT Managers. Using these resources and platforms at scale and effectively to minimise the cost of maintenance is similarly challenging, and while over-spending on IT is serious, exposing the business to risk by under-spending is even more so.

IT Managers are challenged to justify the cost for an in-house team that holds all the required certifications to maintain the today s complex IT environments. However, without an appropriately sized team, there aren t enough esources to perform all the necessary maintenance activities. Valuable internal resources are used to fix problems, regardless of the level of expertise required. The result is a team of over-worked experts and high maintenance cost. The IT department may be meeting service levels as committed to the organisation, but are failures really being resolved as quickly as possible? If not, then there s room for improvement. Further costs can be saved and improvements in user experience made by resolving incidents more quickly especially if downtime occurs on technology that supports an organisation s daily functions. Not knowing the status of the IT assets in your environment is a dangerous situation in which to be. Standardising operations, supporting compliance requirements and making low risk IT investment decisions hinge on knowing what IT assets are in the environment, where they are located and if they pose a threat to the security of the estate. Without visibility of IT assets there s no control over the IT estate and costs can easily spin out of control due to delays in uptime or due to poor investment decisions made off the back of outdated asset information. The time and effort spent on managing vendors and service providers might mean there s little time left to meet the level of service the business expects. Worse yet, not managing your contracts could leave you at risk of lapsed agreements or devices that are no longer maintained. Keeping track of vendors and the devices they look after doesn t leave enough time to deal with the regular upkeep of your IT environment. Haphazard maintenance is costly. When there is interruption to a service in the IT estate, it s not unusual to have to call more than one vendor before the issue can be logged and addressed and for vendor conflict to arise. Significant amounts of time can pass before the responsible vendor starts measuring against a service level agreement. In turn, time wasted impacts on the speed at which you can deliver service to the business and doesn t allow you to commit to reasonable service delivery times. Your department is seen to be inflexible and not willing to offer guaranteed levels of service to parts of the business, unless they re critical. Proactively handling the failures that cause downtime makes resourcing and IT platform investment a vital part of IT maintenance. But investing in leading technology is costly and finding the right skills is a challenge for IT Managers.

Keeping downtime at a minimum Proactive maintenance delivered by determined and open professionals from Dimension Data assists you in accelerating towards the goal of an IT environment that minimises the amount of downtime. A cost-effective way of handling resource constraints is to access the right resource for the type of failure through Dimension Data s Uptime Maintenance Service. Not only can our teams handle faults and restore IT products across multiple vendors and technologies, they make the fix within a set response or result time that is agreed with you. Having access to remote engineers or an engineer who ll arrive on site with spares, if the problem can t be fixed remotely means that your skilled in-house engineers aren t stretched to the point where they cause delays in fixing the problems and can stay focused on more strategic IT projects. By turning on Uptime s built-in, remote features: Availability Monitoring; Configuration Archive and Secure Remote Access we can improve our responsiveness to failures, keep IT-related unproductivity to a minimum and reduce financial loss. By using Dimension Data s Asset Tracking capabilities you will have a source of truth that keeps track of all changes to your assets, allowing you to gain a comprehensive understanding of how your infrastructure is supported and provides visibility of the risks to which the business is susceptible. With this knowledge, IT decision makers are betterpositioned to make the right IT architecture and financial decisions. By having a single point of contact for support issues, regardless of the vendor or service provider involved, ensures you receive consistent service, as well as delivers a reliable service to the business. When you partner with a worldwide leader in service delivery, who s able to maintain multiple vendor technologies, aggregate and manage multiple vendors on your behalf and offer guaranteed resolution times, you can rest assured that commitments made to the business to solve IT issues within a specified time will be met. For more information on our Service Level Commitments please refer to the Service Level Datasheets. plan build support manage improve innovate Develop plans that achieve business objectives Deploy and transition IT architectures Support full lifecycle of IT assets Manage full lifecycle of IT domains Optimise IT services Differentiate through technology innovation Proactive maintenance delivered by determined and open professionals from Dimension Data assists you in accelerating towards the goal of an IT environment that minimises the amount of downtime.

What we offer Dimension Data s involvement can start as early developing plans to achieve your business objectives using technology. As a first step, we ll clarify your objectives and help you justify any new investments. As you build your IT environment, deploying new and transitioning existing IT infrastructure, we procure and assist you to deploy the most appropriate technology solutions, managing the risk throughout. Supporting your lifecycle of assets is where Uptime Maintenance Service can make a difference. It s designed to facilitate rapid response to incidents and restore failed devices according to service level agreements that suit your business requirements. Dimension Data s Uptime Maintenance Service is made up of a number of service elements, which all work together to minimise downtime and provide business continuity. Dimension Data s Uptime Maintenance Service is made up of a number of service elements, which all work together to minimise downtime and provide business continuity. Maintenance: Incident Management A single point of contact for all your incidents around the world through our Global Service Centres Management and prioritisation of the incident or request to achieve the service levels agreed with you Access to manufacturer support, so your IT team can access manufacturer documentation, tools, bulletins and engineers, when needed Uptime Monitoring Automated discovery of failed hardware components Immediate remote diagnostic access Automated Configuration archive for specific devices Asset Tracking A source of truth that keeps track of all IT asset changes Reconciliation of asset data Improved visibility of IT assets Improved inventory accuracy Flexible Service Levels Helps allocate the appropriate level of response to incidents that occur with specific software and hardware devices in alignment with their expense allocations and importance to the business Provides a broad combination of response and resolution commitments that can be applied across a range of service calendars for around-the-clock protection of critical business systems Provides access to engineers and technicians that liaise directly with vendors to accelerate incident resolution Assures rapid restoration of your unified communication technologies anytime, anywhere in the world Parts to Site When a replacement part is required, we ll dispatch parts to meet our agreed service levels Where replacement parts have been shipped we manage the faulty part return process (often referred to as return material authorisation) Engineer to Site If an incident cannot be resolved remotely, we ll dispatch one of our highly skilled and certified engineers to your site Subscription Services Access to the latest software patches and minor feature releases provided for you to install on the configuration items Access to latest major software upgrades provided for you to install on the configuration items Access to latest software signature file provided for security profile updates for you to install on the configuration items Services Portal Online incident and request logging; moves, additions, changes and deletes (MACDs) recording, and standard reporting Online access to contract details Online access to incident and request reports Multi-vendor Service Aggregation Procurement, renewal and management of our underpinning or your direct manufacturer (vendor) maintenance contracts Administration of claims against the vendor for returned material First level support and dispatch of incident and service requests to the vendor in question for vendors where we can t provide a committed service level and procure a vendor service on your behalf For more information on each service element, please refer to the service description.

Why Dimension Data? Multiple vendors and multiple technologies characterise your IT ecosystem, which is why our diversity of technical expertise and experience, and close vendor relationships will prove critical to you. Looking at your assets with a long-term, lifecycle management view that lowers overall costs, we help you move beyond an expensive, purely reactive approach. In order to pass the benefits of influence, pricing and knowledge on to you, we ve forged long-term relationships with vendors. Dimension Data is a leading partner to world class IT manufacturers for services across networking, security, unified communications, data centres and contact centres. In addition to a spread of technologies, you want to work with the best experts in each area, who are guaranteed by the highest levels of certification among our engineers. Your need for flexibility in the way you procure IT services will be best served by Dimension Data s proven ability to execute standardised services and fit-for-purpose service level agreements, no matter where in the world you are. Please refer to the Uptime multivendor support annexure for a list of vendors supported both regionally and globally.

What s the next step? Contact us to discuss the challenges you face with reactive or break-fix maintenance as well as the proactive solutions we can offer to meet your business specific maintenance needs For more information on this and other Dimension Data solutions and services, visit www.dimensiondata.com CS / DDMS-1107 / 04/13 Copyright Dimension Data 2013 For further information visit: www.dimensiondata.com

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