MSP & Outsourcers

Managed service providers (MSPs) and outsourcers provide a viable alternative for meeting the IT needs of enterprises large and small instead of having to recruit, train and retain their own on-site technical support staff. The promise of having a competent third party monitor the IT infrastructure and resolve any issues lets clients focus on the core competencies of their business. Despite advances in remote management technologies that allow MSPs and outsourcers to virtually monitor and control a company’s entire network operations off-site, challenges still remain.

Management Challenges

To stay ahead in this hyper-competitive industry, MSPs and outsourcers need to find ways to both drive down their operational costs, as well as maintain and improve service levels to avoid financial penalties for missed SLAs. However, ensuring high availability and performance for customers with geographically distributed networks and multiple remote locations presents a number of unique management challenges for the operational and support staff of MSPs and outsourcers.

On-site repair and maintenance is still required for break-fix work such as hardware failures or for advanced system maintenance tasks like complex configuration changes, which drives up costs and eats into profit margins. Deploying a technician on-site to a remote location not only increases costs, but lengthens downtime and impacts SLAs as he or she tries to accurately diagnose and resolve a problem with limited data. Additionally, risks increase as security policies are often bypassed during an outage in favor of restoring service as quickly as possible, and human error can extend an outage when a change or recovery action fails.

Existing network monitoring and management tools fall short on meeting these challenges because the majority only work in-band, or when the primary network is up, and lack the automated capabilities to correct problems or perform routine tasks without manual intervention. MSPs and outsourcers have been left to manage with tools designed for the internal support of centralized networks that are not able to respond to their unique challenges.

The Uplogix Secure Remote Management (SRM) Platform

Uplogix offers a new approach to remote management that drastically reduces the cost and complexity of supporting highly distributed IT environments. Uplogix SRM appliances enable MSPs and outsourcers to remotely monitor, manage, and control a customer’s distributed network environment. The appliances collocate and connect over dedicated serial or private Ethernet connections to network devices, servers, and power controllers to provide non-stop local management and control. The appliance is able to take local action on remote equipment using a database of information collected over time and an advanced rules-based engine. Examples include rolling back a config or even power cycling a router that is unresponsive. More importantly, Uplogix can take action even when the network is down. Besides the automated actions, it facilitates advanced remote administration, enforcing security and logging any action taken, both in- and out-of-band using landline, cellular or satellite modems.

The solution saves MSPs and outsourcers significant labor costs by displacing mundane daily maintenance tasks and helping to eliminate the dispatch of costly, limited IT personnel to remote customer sites. Uplogix augments existing network/systems management with a unique ability to not only alert, but to take immediate local action to remediate issues.

Using the Uplogix Control Center, MSP operations staff can centrally manage multiple customers’ network, communications and other IT devices connected to Uplogix appliances via a simple, web-based interface with multi-tenant capabilities.