The DSS Consulting services team offers a comprehensive managed services portfolio that features a range of solutions such as
DSS’s Managed Service offerings allow DSS to monitor and manage your network. Depending on the level chosen this proactive solution can enable DSS to efficiently monitor, update, and troubleshoot the IT environments of organisations over a secure internet connection. This is an ideal complement to your standard IT maintenance contract.
DSS’s Managed Service offerings are designed to help you achieve more, by improving the cost effectiveness of your current systems, reducing the management time spent on the IT administration leaving you more time to concentrate on the more strategic issues and providing objective advice to help you realise future plans.
Outsourced Helpdesks
DSS offer a comprehensive managed services portfolio that features a range of sourcing solutions such outsourced helpdesks and desktop managed services designed to help you achieve more, by improving the cost effectiveness of your current systems, reducing the management time spent on the existing IT estate and providing objective advice to help you realise future plans.
Our clients benefit from our knowledge gained through managing a diverse range of IT systems from organisations in all walks of life. Our tools and processes have been honed by our people to enable clients to benefit from our cumulative experience
IT is core to every business – but it’s not your core business. Why devote a disproportionate amount of time and effort to managing and supporting a complex IT infrastructure every day? Why suffer the cost and difficulty of constantly recruiting and retaining more specialised skills?
Instead, through IT Outsourcing Services, you can pass on the risk and responsibility to an experienced partner like DSS, thereby releasing your own in-house team for more strategic projects. Other benefits of IT outsourcing services of your IT infrastructure include:
- Concentration on core business
- Establish new IT management models and processes
- Convert fixed allocated costs to variable
- Cost transparency
- Facilitate best of breed implementation of new applications
- High level of security and availability
- Change IT culture
- Adherence to service levels
- Scalable and efficient workflow organisation
- Retain and re-skill staff for emerging needs
- Clear responsibilities and strong service orientation
- The right know how at the right time
The Helpdesk is the single most time-consuming activity undertaken by the IT department. Having highly skilled people focused on remedial tasks is not cost effective or productive, yet the benefit of freeing up these staff for proactive tasks and projects would be immense to the organisation.
A well implemented IT Managed Helpdesk provides a tool to lessen a company's support costs and burdens, as well as a platform to improve business processes, employee productivity, customer support and asset management.
The DSS approach for delivering successful Helpdesk solutions is based on the fact that no two given solutions will be the same. As business needs vary greatly from business to business, so too will the recommended solutions. It is through establishing an on-going relationship with the customer that we are in a position to accurately determine the nature and level of support required.
DSS can offer:
- The intellectual capital available to accurately determine the current “stage" of support being delivered within the existing Helpdesk environment
- Develop the plan to migrate to the next level of support
- Ultimately execute the changes required to accomplish the desired end-state
- Provide accurate documentation of all policies, procedures and call escalation processes
- Defining and establishing appropriate Service Level Agreements (SLA) against which the contract can be monitored
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Online Data Backup
The Problem
The Benefits
The Solution
The Pricing Structure
Online Data Backup - The Problem
The loss of IT capacity and telecommunications is seen as the worst disruption scenarios for organisations, and 48% of managers admit that their businesses have experienced one or more interruptions within the past year. 57% of business disasters are IT-related.
About half of small and medium-sized firms now do perform some sort of data backup, but not always adequately. Because they have limited or no IT staff, they do bulk server backup only when they can, and seldom store tapes offsite. Hence a large numbers of businesses would be unable to recover business data after a server crash or disaster.
Although 40% of medium-sized businesses are using advanced network-based storage options, they are failing to protect their employees' PCs and laptops. Less than 50% indicate they have a backup routine for PCs and laptops.
It takes 19 days and costs in excess of €14,000 to re-enter just 20 MB worth of sales and marketing data. Retrieving accounting records is even worse; they require over 21 days of work and cost over €15,700 to re-type.
93% of businesses say that data storage is an extremely important part of their organisation but only 20% of those surveyed said that there was a high level of understanding of storage and storage issues within their companies.
This is especially alarming because it is the smaller companies that are most likely to feel the economic impact if disaster, whether natural or man-made, should strike. Fewer resources, and sometimes limited IT experience and expertise, mean that technology downtime can disproportionately affect smaller firms, hurting their ability to keep operating while all around them falls to pieces.
85% of businesses that suffer major data loss go out of business within 2 years.
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Online Data Backup - The Benefits
Advances in data replication and secure technologies combined with reduced bandwidth costs allow DSS to offer continuous online data backup, recovery and electronic vaulting services to businesses with limited or no IT support.
By outsourcing your data backup to DSS it means contracting out IT systems maintenance to a professional organisation with properly trained staff that can offer the expertise and resources to offer whatever support is required.
The Old Way - Tape back-up
* Semi automated (at best)
* Limited Security and compression
* Labour intensive
* Multiple tapes onsite
* Problematic
* Expensive
The New Way - Online Data Storage and Online Data Backup
* Fully automated
* Held offsite on disk and tape
* Only new/changed data backed up
* Immediate recovery
* Incremental back-ups
* Full data encryption
* Common file elimination
* Agentless
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Online Data Backup - The Solution
Our Server Backup Solutions allow users to backup servers and databases online using any internet connection. Server Backup makes it easy for any user to quickly backup and retrieve data 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
Our online storage system works with most existing backup software utilities like ArcServe, BackupExec and NT Backup. Whether you are backing-up a database, archiving an e-mail server or simply scheduling a backup of a LINUX server via FTP, Server Backup Solution can receive and securely store the backed-up data offsite for you. No more tapes to store and manage.
DSS offer a complete solution:
* No tape handling - a direct saving
* Faster back ups and restores - a direct service improvement
* No courier issues or costs - more savings
* Your personnel able to concentrate on their core functions, increasing productivity
* Easily integrates with any existing Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery strategy
We centralise the backup to single point on network:
* Reduces configuration, administration and backup window
* Fully automates the backup process
* Multiple offsite copies of the data
* Rapid data recovery in the event of data loss
* Highly secure, encrypted transmission and storage
* Exchange, SQL Server and Oracle Database Support
The backup service supports applications like Microsoft Exchange, Lotus Domino and Novell GroupWise mail systems and SQL Server Oracle and DB2 databases so backups can be taken directly from these applications without having to shut them down, ensuring safe backups data.
Mail data can be restored by message, user, group or entire mail store.
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Online Data Backup - The Pricing Structure
The cost for the service is simple. You are only charged for the volume of data you have located at the backup site. You are not charged for data transmission and data recovery. You can restore data as often as you want.
Note that you are charged for compressed data only. With an average compression ratio of 4:1, if you are backing up 40 GB, you will only be charged for 10 GB.
Long-term unchanging data attracts a lower charge, further reducing costs.
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Remote Monitoring Solutions
Remote Server Administration and Management Service
DSS offers a fully managed remote server administration and management service. This supplements and greatly extends DSS existing hardware maintenance and support services. It provides an additional level of support to ensure greater system availability and reduces the duration of server downtime and the impact of this downtime. It introduces greater proactivity into the management of your servers.
System Center Operations Manager
The System Center Operations Manager (Replacement for Microsoft Operations Manager) extends server monitoring to critical business areas such as:
- Using the SQL Server Management Pack the health of SQL Server databases can be monitored
- Using the Exchange Server 2003 Management Pack, monitoring server and mail system availability as well as ability to discover and depict memberships of routing groups, relationships between routing groups, roles of the various Exchange servers, and status of servers, providing an up-to-date view of your entire mail infrastructure
- Using the Active Directory Management Pack Active Directory Domain Controllers can be monitored to ensure areas such as replication is configured correctly
- Using the Baseline Security Analyzer, security vulnerability assessments and security update scans can be performed on servers running Microsoft Windows 2000 and later.
Features and Benefits of Remote Server Management
- Pro-active management of hardware problems
- Management of multiple servers of different types
- Integrated with DSS hardware maintenance and support service
- Automatic interface to Help Desk
- Support for wide range of systems, applications and types of hardware with specific alerting
- Customised reporting
- Online console for status viewings
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