Custom Maintenance Solutions
NIC Partners’ Lifecycle Services are built to the standards of ITIL®, one of the industry’s leading frameworks for helping businesses improve services support and delivery. ITIL® is a comprehensive documentation of leading practices for the provision, support, and management of effective IT services, and it underpins the British Standard IT Service Management (ITSM) BS 15000. The Cisco Lifecycle approach aligns business and technical requirements through all six phases of the network lifecycle:
1 Prepare
2 Plan
3 Design
4 Implement
5 Operate
6 Optimize
An organization spends substantial time and money in the operate phase, living with the technology in the company’s environment. Throughout this phase, a company maintains the ongoing health of its system, proactively monitoring and managing it to maximize its performance, capacity, availability, reliability, and security. The company manages and resolves problems and implements changes affecting its system by replacing or repairing hardware as needed. It makes physical and logical moves, additions and changes, and keeps system software and applications current, all the while managing hardware and software suppliers to help ensure efficient delivery of products or services.
NIC Partners’ services deliver 24x7 remote management and monitoring of your network. Based upon ITIL® standards, your network immediately benefits from a comprehensive, consistent, and coherent framework for IT service management across three critical processes:
-Incident management: to detect and restore interruptions to service
-Problem management: to identify root causes of Incidents, where possible, and provide recommendations for prevention
-Change management: to manage the approval, build, test, and implementation phases to reduce undesired effects
Incident Management
The objective of incident management within ITIL® is to restore normal operations as quickly as possible with the least possible effect on either the business or the user. 
Incidents may match known errors (previously identified root causes) or existing problems (unidentified root causes) under the control of problem management. Where existing workarounds have been developed, a quick first-line fix may be recommended as a first course of action. If an incident is not caused by an existing known error, it may
require problem management and possibly a new problem record.
NIC Partners’ processes within incident management typically involve:
- Incident detection and recording
- Classification and initial support
- Investigation and diagnosis
- Resolution and recovery
- Incident closure
- Incident ownership, monitoring, tracking, and communication
Problem Management
Where an incident’s cause is not known, NIC Partners’ comprehensive set of procedures within problem management offer a powerful way to identify the root cause of the incident and possibly prevent the recurrence of incidents related to these errors.
NIC Partners’ processes within problem management typically involve:
- Providing problem control
- Providing error control
- Proactively identifying problems
- Conducting major problem reviews
- Providing management information about problem management quality and operations
Change Management
Changes in IT infrastructure are necessary for several reasons. An organization may seek improved efficiency and effectiveness in its network to take advantage of business opportunities, for example. Change may also be led by external pressures from legislative or environmental changes. Finally, changes may be required in response to known incidents and problems.
NIC Partners’ policies help ensure that standardized methods, processes, and procedures are used for all changes to controlled IT infrastructure to minimize the number and effect of related incidents upon service. Change management is responsible for managing change processes involving:
- Hardware
- Communications equipment and software
- System software
- Documentation and procedures associated with the running, support and maintenance of live systems
- Filtering changes
- Managing changes and the change process
- Reviewing and closing of requests for change (RFCs)
- Management reporting and providing management information
Retain Control of Your Assets
NIC Partners’ Management Services agreements are flexible enough to help ensure that you retain complete control of your network operations. We offer:
- A single point of accountability: you are still in charge.
- Hardware neutrality: it does not matter what combination of hardware/software is deployed.
- Extension of staff and team: the arrangement is no threat to your current staff, and there is no steep learning curve.
- Co-managed service: we interact with you to solve issues and be responsible for solving them.
Lower Total Cost of Ownership
Using NIC Partners’ Remote Management Services can help you lower your total cost of ownership through:
• Identifying and validating technology requirements
• Planning for infrastructure changes and resource requirements
• Improving the efficiency of your network and of the staff supporting it
• Reducing operating expenses by improving the efficiency of operation processes and tools
Increased Network Availability and Business Agility
NIC Partners’ Management Services increase your network availability by proactively monitoring your system and assessing availability trends, while identifying security breaches and defining remediation plans. You also gain improved business agility by leaving the work of installing, configuring, and integrating system components to NIC Partners’ experts, allowing the team to continually enhance the performance of your network.
NIC Partners’ Managed Services: A Team Approach
NIC Partners provides a team of technology and customer service experts to deliver the highest quality IT Systems support. NIC Partners delivers services using a team approach. Your technology needs will not be tied to the limitations of a ‘break/fix’ IT person as often happens with small service providers. Instead as an NIC Partners client, you will find a team of support engineers and customer service professionals working with you to deliver the best IT services and customer care the industry has to offer. Your client services team includes:
- A relationship manager responsible for the overall management of the relationship
- A team of support engineers who take responsibility for the day-to-day servicing
- Client Operations Representatives who are responsible for client communications, scheduling and general requests
- Senior resources to handle specialized projects, Virtual CIO capabilities, or high level strategic planning
- A Centralized Services organization for remote support, remote monitoring and back office capabilities
- A 24-hour, 7-day a week emergency support hotline
- A strong pool of consultants both locally and nationally
- On-site presence of Sr. Engineering quality
NIC Partners Return-On-Investment Model for Managed Services Support
NIC Partners has developed a model for evaluating costs of hiring full-time staff versus outsourcing Managed Services support and Help Desk functionality. We have estimating significant savings utilizing this tool below.
Please note: This is a sample only. NIC Partners is happy to review this model with your organization and customize an ROI model based on your actual data.