Managed Data Services

Companies that actively manage their critical business data by employing a robust business continuity and disaster recovery strategy can reduce their current risk of losing vital business critical data by using an outsourced Managed Data Service.

Businesses are being pushed to drive aggressive efficiencies, quickly and significantly - protecting the environment and corporate social responsibility is also high on every businesses agenda.

Our clients require business solutions that deliver measurable business benefits and return on investment (ROI) whilst supporting sustainability goals.

By outsourcing Managed Data Services you can reduce costs and release internal resource to be more effective in tasks directly connected to their main business goals.

Major benefits for a business when implementing a Managed Data Service Strategy fall into the following categories:

1. Constant visibility, containment and control of all costs
2. Increasing the efficiency and sustainability of your data service
3. Facilitating better risk mitigation, governance and compliance
4. Increased user satisfaction
5. Provision of accurate and meaningful management information

Major benefits for the IT division of a company that implements a Managed Data Service Strategy cover the following:

1. Greater control, monitoring, reporting, regular reviews
2. Less in-house resource required
3. Increased capabilities to deliver more core services to the organisation
4. Significantly improved service quality and consistency
5. A single partner for the whole business continuity and disaster recovery solution, delivering on a single data management strategy

It consists of four simple stages that work in a continuous cycle.

1. Assess

Obtain a much greater understanding of your existing data storage infrastructure, business continuity processes and disaster recovery requirements. This phase requires an agreement to share access to the systems where data is stored and to engage key users and support staff, it is normally sponsored in the business by a senior executive stakeholder. The objective of this stage is to produce a jointly agreed Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Plan for the current environment. This assessment typically takes 3-4 weeks to complete. Confidence for both parties is dependent upon the quality and level of information provided at the assessment stage.

2. Design

Focus on creating the right solution utilising elements of software, hardware and support services that will meet your business continuity and disaster recovery project objectives. This centres on a full understanding of the existing technology base, recovery point objectives, recovery time objectives, we also assist in streamlining the support processes for incidents such as email message or file retrieval and recovery, to full system recovery in the event of a major component failure, or denial of access to your workplace. There may also be a need for additional services such as user training and helpdesk integration. The output of this phase is the production of a fully documented recovery procedure and proposal for the most appropriate solution.

3. Implement

Set up all of the relevant processes, agreements and technologies to meet the contracted requirements. This is driven by two key stages:

1. Transition which focuses on changing the provision of service on an existing device or service to Smartways
2. Transformation which focuses on changing the process or technology used to provide the service.

MDS will start to deliver service improvements, cost savings and peace of mind from day one. Furthermore, we will ensure that you do not need to make any significant changes on day one in order to achieve this. We mitigate any potential impact on the end users by providing a clear project plan with agreed timescales and milestones. Working within Prince2 methodology we ensure efficient service deployment for your business and moving you forward into the optimised design.

4. Manage

This is the heart of the Managed Data Service, partnering with you to guarantee that you receive ongoing account management in the way that’s right for your business and ensuring that the service performance levels are maintained over the contract life. This phase consists of three key activities:

• Data Management: ensuring that the technical aspects such as file types, file locations, retention policies are all correctly aligned for the business, data sets are in place for all devices, folders and files to be backed up.
• Incident management: handling all requests in a professional and timely manner within specified SLA’s
• Account management: ensuring that new requirements and changes to existing requirements are properly defined, agreed and implemented

The partnership doesn’t end there. We will continue to work with you into the future to make sure that your business continuity and disaster recovery service is always optimally located in terms of resilience, optimally running and optimally managed – as well as ensuring that the technologies you use are the right choice. To make this happen, we’ll carry out regular strategy reviews, engage in consultancy with you and have regular meetings to ensure that the services you receive meet any pre-agreed SLAs. So whenever your business changes your business continuity plan can change with it to adapt to deliver against your new demands.

Smartways will maximize your cost savings and continually fine-tune your managed data service using proactive monitoring tools to predict growth and resolve potential issues. Best of all, we can completely customise service offerings to your unique business needs and budget.

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