InfraOps extends CSS Corp's best in breed remote monitoring services (InfraWatch) providing customers with customized out-tasking services to support the IT Operations. The support processes are enabled by the RIMS platform to proactively identify and resolve incidents and problems before they impact your business. InfraOps provides remote administrative and support services for selected Mission Critical Application IT Infrastructure, allowing IT Executives to support Service Levels usually available only in large businesses, while allowing their core IT staff to focus on the strategic goals of their business.
InfraOps takes the day-to-day administrative, and break-fix functions of the IT department, and provides those services remotely. This service is performed 7 days a week, 24 hours a day, 365 days per year on a per server/device basis. All managed objects are monitored in CSS Corp' Global Visibility Center utilizing the InfraWatch service, and managed from the Global Visibility Centers located in the United States and India to provide L1/L2/L3 administrative services for the infrastructure being managed.
All these services are provided utilizing ITIL Best Practices, and all delivery personnel at CSS Corp hold ITIL Foundations Certification. L2/L3 Technical leads also hold vendor certification for the technologies they are managing, providing customers the capabilities usually only found in large enterprises, for the price that small and medium businesses can afford.
Why InfraOps?
InfraOps is a remote management service that allows our clients the peace of mind that comes with knowing their mission critical application infrastructure is in the hands of skilled IT professionals 24x7. From it's global Visibility Centers, CSS Corp' constantly monitors and manages the selected IT components you elect to out- task. InfraOps is best suited for organizations with the following characteristics:
- IT Support Staff stretched too thin
- Finding that business critical projects are lagging due to constant "firefighting"
- Unpredictable IT Operational costs
- Experience dynamic changes in the demands on the IT Operations staff
- Require 24x7 coverage, but do not want to staff 24x7
- Find it challenging to recruit and retain the required skills to specific technologies
By leveraging InfraOps, you can selectively out-task the management of the IT infrastructure or individual IT components to CSS Corp based upon clear and measurable service levels. CSS Corp' adherence to ITIL based service delivery processes ensures a high level of consistency in the quality of services delivered while ensuring the proper controls are in place to support compliance and audit requirements.
A set of ITIL based Service Offerings extending the functionality provided by the CSS Corp's RIMS platform, providing world class support from the CSS Corp's InfraOps team. Through intelligent integration with the RIMS platform and central portal, the team is able to respond to, resolve, and report on alarm conditions and incidents, resulting in a net reduction in expended effort by the client and client IT team, when an incident occurs.
The InfraOpsService Category consists of the following Service Offerings:
- Reactive Service Restoration
- Configuration Management and Administration
- Vendor Management
- Escalation and Notification
- Incident & Problem Management
- Capacity Management
InfraOps provides the following key deliverables for a predictable cost:
In-depth Monitoring and Tracking
CSS Corp' service delivery platform, CSS Corp proactively monitors and tracks the critical IT infrastructure components and services to ensure potential issues are identified before they cause and outage or service degradation.
Incident & Problem Management
A key feature of InfraOps is the ownership CSS Corp accepts for managing the ITIL based Incident and Problem Management processes to ensure the timely incident restoration (Incident Management) and the permanent removal of the root cause (Problem Management).
Change & Configuration Management
All configuration changes made to the infrastructure are managed and controlled through the ITIL based Change and Configuration Management processes to make certain all appropriate approvals are received and testing is completed before implementing the change in production.
Daily Administrative Support
InfraOps service engineers are responsible for the daily execution of administrative and operational activities required to keep the infrastructure available and performing to service levels, including moves, adds and changes (MACs), backups and restores, patch installation, system and network administrative tasks, etc.
Reporting
InfraPortal, CSS Corp' web based reporting portal, provides immediate access to the status of the managed environment as well as historical performance reports, inventory and exception bases reports for trend analysis and capacity planning activities.
Reactive service restoration
CSS Corp provides reactive remote management services from our offshore locations. CSS Corp provides guidance on diagnostic and escalation procedures required to quickly restore services. Reactive incident processes are integrated with Help Desk, Problem Management and Change Management processes. CSS Corp management includes enterprise-wide systems, applications, servers and databases. Dedicated/shared engineers will resolve or troubleshoot IT issues on a 24x7 basis. CSS Corp engineers will perform issue resolution from incident management to Change management. Our L1-L3 resources help you to resolve the issues without affecting your business operations.
Configuration Management and Administration
Extension to the CSS Corp's RIMS Platform, CSS Corp is providing ITIL standard Configuration Management practices. Provisioning and tracking of changes to your IT systems is performed via the integrated Configuration Management Database (CMDB) within the RIMS platform, allowing full integration with the Event and Incident Management service offerings. You can access information within the CMDB via the central CSS Corp's RIMS portal. System administration also includes regular maintenance and management of Infrastructure including Patches, updates and configurations.
Server Management
Server Management - CSS Corp specialists work from multiple offshore/near-shore and will monitor key components and the utilization of system resources, including server availability, utilization rate, performance and configuration. CSS Corp specialist administrators work in real time to ensure effective functioning of your servers and to prevent any problems from occurring, which could interrupt server operations. Server management services include:
- 24/7 administration of the server, data center using a slew of automated tools
- Remote problem & incident management
- Operating System upgrade & version control
- Ensuring data consistency across master server, cluster and slaves
- Optimize disk usage, processor usage & load balancing
- Security and bug patch notification for the operating system
- Performance monitoring of Internet-based infrastructure including hardware, software, OS, bandwidth & websites (collocation, automatic traffic redirection, storage replication & mirroring)
- Alert & problem escalation to appropriate party based on agreed upon processes
Storage Management
CSS Corp has significant expertise in managing very large, complex SAN environments. CSS Corp engineers will monitor SAN availability, utilization rate, performance and configuration on a 24x7 basis to ensure that mission critical data is always available. Storage management services include:
- 24/7 administration SAN using a slew of automated tools.
- Remote problem & incident management.
- Optimize SAN usage & data load balancing.
- Elimination of replication delays, through usage of best practices.
- Implementation of state-of-the-art storage technologies such as Storage Area Network (SAN) and Network Attached Storage (NAS)
- SAN, NAS and Backup/Restore services
- Enhanced business continuity through data striping, local mirroring, remote data copy and Backup/Restore services, vaulting and archiving services
- Alert & problem escalation to appropriate party based on agreed boundaries.
Network Management
CSS Corp helps you create a robust, scalable and high performance enterprise network by designing your data networking infrastructure, managing performance and capacity for applications and by troubleshooting the most complex networking challenges. CSS Corp network administrators will monitor your network infrastructure 24x7, ensure that your network functions at its optimum level and that effective performance & capacity planning practices are in place. This involves:
- Managing Network Devices - Configuration and maintenance of firewalls, load balancers, routers, switches, hubs, etc.
- Managing Network Performance - Monitor network thresholds, manage and administer network usage effectively. Detect network degradation before it becomes service affecting. Provide visibility of spare capacity and utilization trends
- Bandwidth Optimization - CSS Corp employs best-of-breed caching, Quality of Service (QoS), compression and network monitoring/reporting technologies into a single solution that looks at bandwidth usage in its entirety and makes recommendations on how best to optimize it.
- Network Fault Management - Optimizing the detection, performing root cause analysis, isolation and streamlining of alarms coupled to the problem resolution process. Accurate determination of fault and its location, results in improved meantime to repair at reduced cost.
- Network Safety - Ensure network safety & isolate programs that are slowing the system. Free bandwidth for key applications. Understand and trace virus traffic. Engage in security & bug patch notification. Administer firewall up-to-dates.
- Technical and Management Reporting - Event analysis, watch lists, recommendations and more.
- Enterprise Voice Networking services to deliver total telephony solutions - be it Fixed, Mobile, Private or VoIP communication. We ensure you get the dependability, robustness and cost efficiency of your telecom network
Database Management
CSS Corp provides 24x7 Remote Database Administration & Monitoring services for enterprise class Oracle, DB2, SQL Server, MySQL, Informix, Postgres SQL and Sybase databases. CSS Corp's highly skilled professionals guarantee superior levels of service that include no-data-loss, quality, reliability, stability and availability of database.
- Database Administration - Perform database installation & upgrade, patch management, maintain database structures, perform table space management and perform archive and database log file maintenance.
- Database Troubleshooting - 24/7 database troubleshooting, problem determination and resolution in response to critical errors and events.
- Database Monitoring - Our monitoring includes database alert logs and traces, storage related alerts, schema object alerts, database audit alerts, resource utilization & alerts from maintenance jobs.
- Capacity Planning - Perform proactive database level capacity planning and performance tuning as required.
- Replication, Backup & Recovery - Administer database replication. Implement database level backup & recovery procedures to meet your requirements.
- Security - Implement database security to only allow authorized access. Manage user accounts, its rights and privileges.
Application Management
CSS Corp provides support for various COTS applications and webservers like Apache, IIS and Java applications. CSS Corp's experts will monitor the parameters like availability, uptime Utilization and etc. 24x7 to keep the application available all the time to the end users.
Vendor management
CSS Corp will follow standard vendor management policy and own lifecycle support till closure in close co-ordination with the third party vendor depending on the support contract. CSS Corp will use any underpinning contracts with the principal or the 3rd party vendors for issues which cannot be resolved by us. CSS Corp will escalate the issues to 3rd party vendors for which there is no current workarounds available or replacement required. CSS Corp will manage the entire third party vendor for the equipments like Hardware, Network supplier, Internet, broadband etc.
Extension of the CSS Corp's RIMS Platform, providing Vendor Management services. A single point of contact (SPOC) is provided by the InfraOps team, ensuring that for all issues, SLAs are adhered to, and that where required, vendors are brought into the incident resolution process.
The following are the activities performed for Vendor management:
- Parts ordering and administration for both warranty and non-warranty equipment
- Parts management, including defective parts returns to OEM or sourcing agent within prescribed timeframes
- OEM Technical Support provision and manufacturer case numbers (when applicable)
- OEM escalation when and as necessary
Escalation and Notification
Extension to the CSS Corp's RIMS Platform, providing SLA based escalation and notifications of critical alarms to client IT department, third party service providers, and management. This keeps the client informed of Critical alarms and incidents in a timely manner, and provides a customizable escalation path to IT and Senior Management within the organization, should the incident not be resolved within an appropriate timeframe.
Through customizable alarm notifications and escalation paths, the Escalation and Notification service offering allows an organization to decide which specific event and incidents should be handled in-house by the IT team, and which should be addressed by a third party - providing the framework for a split-support model.
Incident & Problem Management
Extension to the CSS Corp's RIMS Platform, providing analysis and resolution of alarms by the CSS Corp InfraOps team using ITIL standard practices. This team, comprised of skilled resources, is able to provide Level 1 through 3 engineering support, allowing the majority of incidents to be addressed without the need for support from the client's internal IT team.
Capacity Management
Extension to the CSS Corp's RIMS Platform, incorporating analysis of trends within data collected by the monitoring platform to provide information on capacity within the client's IT system. This provides proactive reporting on system capacity, allowing the client to implement additional capacity in a timely manner.
Customer Delight
