In order to guarantee your mission-critical applications and services, you have Service Level Agreements (SLAs) agreed with your Managed Service Provider (MSP). They may claim to achieve that SLA, but you are not so sure. Anecdotally, performance has been poor of late, and users are complaining of poor application performance.

Lack of proof

Without measuring MSP delivery against SLAs, you have no guarantee that they are being met. Worse, even if they are being breached, you have no way of proving it, and are therefore unable to claim on the penalty clause. In the meanwhile, company performance is suffering, users are unhappy and, locked into a contract, the IT Director is powerless to respond.

 

Any project to instigate a performance management system may be too costly, too late. What you need is a low-cost, low-risk way of auditing your MSP's performance, particularly against the SLAs they have signed up to.

 

Perhaps you have SLAs in place with many providers, or you would like to monitor internal, as well as external SLAs.

The evidence you need

TDB Network is pleased to offer its Network Performance Audit Service. Once pre-requisites have been met, our Network Performance Audit typically takes just 2 weeks to set up. At the end of this period, you will be measuring the quality of service being delivered by your MSP, with any and all SLA threshold breaches clearly visible to both you and your MSP.

 

Our standard audit profiles can be quickly modified to reflect your SLAs, covering network, service and application availability and capacity. We can measure link, CPU, memory, database, application and protocol performance down to the port level.

 

Complex thresholds can be set to reflect the specifics of your SLAs. Whether based on average, busy-hour, or 90th percentile performance target, and whether reporting periods are monthly or 24-hour, our Network Performance Audit Service can manage, report and even alert on complex thresholds.

Full performance consultancy

 

If required, we can make a full set of performance recommendations, including:

• Link capacity recommendations
• Network resilience recommendations
• MSP contractual recommendations
• SLA specification recommendations

 

Continuation option

The SLA audit offers only a single snapshot of your MSP's performance. Once complete, service levels may rise or drop further. TDB Fusion offer the option to retain the audit system on completion of the audit. This allows you to maintain a rolling, real-time network performance audit.

Multiple audits

If several networks require auditing, or audits are performed regularly, TDB Fusion offers competitive audit packages.

Outsourcing

If you audit other organisations' networks, you can outsource this activity to TDB Fusion.

Network technology convergence, consolidation and migration exercises face major service providers and enterprises worldwide. Migrating networks manually whilst maintaining quality of service is time consuming and laborious, no matter how skilled the resource. Whether migrating to VoIP (Voice over IP), MPLS (Multi-Protocol Label Switching) or all-IP, you need a migration strategy which guarantees that your customer's Service Level Agreements (SLAs) are met. This requires both automation and experience.

Case study

TDB Fusion innovative Network Migration Service automates your network migration using highly controlled workflow, automated provisioning, integrated performance test and full rollback capability.
One customer required the automated migration of 1,200 worldwide regional offices from a legacy infrastructure to an MPLS (Multi-Protocol Label Switching) environment.

We achieved this quickly, efficiently and accurately. The results were impressive, with around 90% time and resource savings. Without automation, the estimated time to complete the migration, whilst incorporating full quality checks, was 150 working days. TDB Fusion' solution took 10 days.

A proven methodology

After an initial requirements gathering phase, we work closely with you to design the network migration process. This process is modelled using a standards-based, graphical workflow engine. Exceptions, performance tests, rollback processes, manual authorisation steps and configuration changes are all designed and thoroughly tested.

The next stage involves automatically gathering device information, through the extraction of system configuration data, customer supplied parameters and the capture of dynamic configuration information. The solution then analyses the data captured and merges it with a series of pre-defined migration templates which automate the deployment of updated configuration data to each device in sequence.

At this stage, the solution has all the information required to implement change. The change process then starts. A full test and validation process is performed at each stage of the migration, with automated regression in the event of failure at any stage in the process.

Call now to discuss requirements

Call now for a free initial consultation. We will evaluation your migration requirements and make initial recommendations on a no-fee basis.

Recent legislation in the United States and Europe has mandated compliance in several key areas
of IT. A recent study indicated that 73% of companies are realigning their organizational structures to better respond to regulatory compliance pressures.

Customers require that your network infrastructure configuration demonstrably adheres to best practice. Many organisations now use automated compliance systems to dramatically reduce the audit headache.

Audit readiness

Without compliance systems, the scale of the problem is difficult to demonstrate to senior management until a major security breach, or network outage occurs. Only then are systemic Authentication, Authorisation and Accounting (AAA) and change management issues revealed.
Regulatory and commercial requirements now demand demonstration of compliance with Sarbanes-Oxley, Basel II, Payment Card Industry (PCI) and ITIL best practice. As organisations merge and divide, due diligence processes also demand network inventory and configuration audits.
Such audits are executed by external agencies and there is often no current process to ensure the audit will pass.
Though fully automated Change, Configuration and Release (CCRM) management systems are available on the market, an organisation may not yet have the experience of such systems to evaluate their worth.

A proven solution

TDB Fusion is pleased to offer its Network Compliance Audit Service. Once pre-requisites have been met, TDB Fusion Network Compliance Audits typically takes just 2 weeks. At the end of this period, you will receive a report detailing any and all areas where your network is out of compliance with the audit policies. The report makes recommendations to bring your network back into compliance TDB Fusion' audit policies cover ITIL best practices, but every organisation has their own specific policies, and we can modify the audit to cover specific Configuration Items (CIs) and policies.

Full compliance testing

A typical Network Compliance Audit covers the following:

• Auto-discovery of all network infrastructure
• Baseline all network infrastructure configuration
• Security analysis
• Best practice analysis
• Authentication, Authorisation and Accounting
• Access Control Lists
• Interface description
• Password
• Port status
• Security banners
• SNMP hosts
• SNMP community strings
• Syslog
• Time synchronisation
• Unused, active ports

Policy enforcement option

If, at the end of the audit, you would like to bring your network configuration back into line with policies, we can do so automatically. We provide a full list of recommended changes and, on your approval, we make the changes in a low-risk manner, within an out-of-hours maintenance window.

Continuation option

The Network Compliance Audit offers only a single snapshot of your network. Once complete, your network may go out of compliance once more. TDB Fusion offer the option to retain the system on completion. This allows you to maintain a rolling, real-time configuration audit.

Multiple audits

If several networks require auditing, or audits are performed regularly, TDB Fusion offers competitive audit packages.

Outsourcing

If you audit other organisations' networks, you can outsource this activity to TDB Fusion.

When intermittent application performance problems start, so does the finger-pointing. Those responsible for networks, servers and applications each insist the others are to blame. In the meantime, mission-critical business processes are affected, hitting operational efficiencies, employee motivation and the bottom line.

In the worst cases, customer-facing processes are affected and your brand suffers irreparable damage. Though many organisations have network and server capacity management systems in place, few measure the end-to-end performance of business transactions. As a result, IT service managers can be lulled into a false sense of security, and can be genuinely surprised when service performance degrades.

More than a tactical fix

We understand how important it is to resolve performance issues as soon as possible, so our troubleshooting engagement starts immediately. From day one, we'll be looking for the true "root cause" of the performance issue, examining client, network, multi-tier server, database and human factor issues. Our team of application, service and network performance experts will deploy a suite of world-class performance management tools at your site, anywhere in the UK or Europe. Throughout the engagement, we monitor:

• The end-to-end performance of key business transactions
• Network performance (all routers, switches, VPN concentrators, firewalls)
• Server performance
• Desktop performance
• User-perceived performance
• VoIP performance

Deliverables

Once the immediate technical root cause has been identified, we provide an interim report:

• Identifying the exact nature of the performance degradation
• Identifying those users, sites and business transactions affected
• Identifying the technical root cause
• Recommending a tactical fix

While the fix is implemented, monitoring continues. In the meantime, we will examine your performance management processes, to discover how the technical issue was allowed to occur.
Once the tactical fix is in place, we will demonstrate its validity by comparing the improved performance against the original baseline. At the end of the engagement, we provide a full management report, conveying key server, network, process and monitoring recommendations.

The confidence you need

Whether related to new IT projects, VoIP migration, increased staffing numbers, application upgrades, network performance, configuration changes or something more intangible, TDB Fusion can guarantee to help improve operational efficiency, and offer the confidence you need that such performance issues cannot recur.