As a UK government accredited security & infrastructure services provider CNS can provide its clients with a managed and hosted environment for their critical business systems, ensuring the confidentiality, integrity and availability of the business critical data that is held on client systems.

CNS are uniquely well placed to provide such business-critical and security sensitive services. CNS consultants are UK government accredited, and our government work in the UK ensures that our security and management procedures are robust and well tested. To date, there has not been a single incidence of a CNS managed service customer suffering data theft, or other significant security breach.

Managed Services are CNS' fastest growing area of service provision. From our operating centre we are able to offer a raft of managed services from being able to monitor and log all activity on you LAN and WAN to fully managing many of our clients network and security devices.

Many IT departments spend something in the region of up to 80% of their time attempting to maintain the systems and technologies they already have. This can very often create an IT environment that is reactive, as it can only respond to current business needs, not future ones. In this type of scenario, emerging technologies that may otherwise reduce work load or enhance productivity cannot be reviewed.

CNS’ Managed Services are designed to offer a pragmatic and cost effective approach to IT Management. CNS’s services not only assure their customer’s of the utmost attention at all times but equally provide the confidence that their IT investment is being looked after on an ongoing basis.

CNS fully appreciate the dynamic needs of their customer base and must ensure their support approach offers the correct level of flexibility to support this need.

CNS’ Managed Service offerings are intended to:

• Introduce best practices and maintain/improve integrity and availability of customer services and applications
• Provide agreed levels of monitoring, management and reliability
• Introduction of intelligent event processing (in the form of key performance indicator alerting)
• Reduce risk and improved regulatory compliance
• Segregate mission and non mission critical systems by improving confidentiality
• Improve operational overheads and skill shortages
• Monitor and improve network and security agility thereby improving the overall quality of IT service delivery

CNS offer the following modules and sub components to achieve the most appropriate service for each customer:

• Device Management Service (Monitoring/Alerting, KPI’s, Service Desk Access)
• Change Management (Authority or Authority/Execution Only and NCCM)
• Fault Management (Limited or Unlimited Fault Analysis Time)
• Threat Management (PPM, CPNI Alerting, Patch Management)
• Hardware/Software Break Fix Service (Managed or Unmanaged)
• Professional Services (optional) – Project time (non fault/incident  analysis time)

Services & Devices:

CNS offer managed services based on the following devices and services:

Service Management

CNS’ Service Management underpins the entire managed service and aims to achieve a common understanding between CNS and the customer through managing service level expectations and delivering against a desired set of results. CNS’s Service Management solution provides continuous monitoring, reporting, troubleshooting, and automated response capabilities that are necessary to manage the customer’s very often complex and heterogeneous IT network infrastructure.

Service Management consists of the following components:

Reporting

Service reporting is absolutely key to any type of managed service as it is the mechanism used to keep the customer up to date with the operational health of their IT systems. CNS’s reports are expected to be relevant, accurate, simple and meaningful. Reports are produced at regular intervals and consist of the following components:

• Incident Reporting – Incident reporting takes the form of a regular report detailing each incident and any remedial steps taken to remedy the incident over a given period of time. This can also act as a very useful forensic audit trail and can help provide insight to ongoing threshold parameters and capacity management characteristics

• Thresholds/Capacity Management – Using accurately set KPI’s, the threshold and capacity management report is used to regularly review device statistics and trends. Recommendations are then made to help improve overall system stability and preparedness for ongoing support of the business function. Capacity management supports the long term availability and performance goals of the infrastructure answering key questions as to the systems future scalability and viability.

Service reports will generally report by exception i.e. report where conditions or expected levels of service have been abnormal or outside of expected tolerance levels. Where results are within expected tolerance levels and are considered normal, CNS reserve the right to omit such results from the report.

Contract/Service Reviews

Contract/ Service reviews are conducted on a regular basis and are primarily concerned with reviewing the performance of the service against the agreed service levels. Service reviews are also used to review any major incidents and other related commercial issues that might need attention and/or correction ahead of the following service period. Typical review/discussion points at each service review will be:

• Review the overall efficiency and value of the supporting managed service
• Review of any major incidents during the service period that require attention and or correction ahead of the following service period
• Re-establishing sensible suite of measurements against required KPI’s
• Review of the achieved system availability levels against target levels
• Highlight any identified levels of availability that are considered out of specification and therefore of possible detriment to the higher level business function
• Continuous review of any service improvements

As stated above, service reviews assess the performance of the service during the current period against the agreed service levels set out at the beginning of the period. Where service levels have not been met, CNS will review with the customer the reasons and agree a mutual line of action. This may take the form of service credits being applied, supplemental charges or changes in service definition. 

Please contact us to find out more.