Customer Background
Our customer is a global manufacturer and retailer of varying lines of products from kitchen products to engines and generators. They have a vast IT landscape which includes products from multiple vendors and systems. Headquartered in the United States, they have a presence across the globe with over 50 manufacturing locations and over 25K employees worldwide.
Scope of Support
Through Miracle's NOC the customer was offered support across North America, Europe and Middle East regions in a staggered offshore shift model to accommodate the 24x7 needs of the customer. The engagement included both voice and non-voice support for all regions supported. The engagement was primarily in English as the main language of communication and included other languages when a point-of-contact was available at customer location.
Our services utilized ITIL (IT Infrastructure Library) processes in managing the overall support model. At a high level, the services included L1 Support(Managing incident management process via Service Desk and related tool, including trouble shoot the issues related to desktop and other enterprise applications) and L2 Support(Network operations, application middleware, security operations, database support, hardware and software asset management processes and windows servers).
The Business Requirement
The customer was looking for a trusted business partner that could manage their Network Operations through a Hybrid Delivery Model ensuring uninterrupted service operations and cost advantage with good quality. The need included requirement of a managed service desk, meeting agreed SLA's along with management of their day-to-day IT operations.
Technology Supported
At our NOC for this customer, the following technology areas and activities were
supported by our teams,
- SAP Security Operations such as user management, role assignment, user group updating, change activities, reviewing HR security roles, and SOD mitigation
- Active Directory Security Operations such as user management, group management, managing GPO's, AD Replication Issues, managing shares, logon scripts, and home directories + Maintaining application and service accounts, password management and PowerShell scripting support for admin tasks
- Application Middleware(Altiris, Unix, etc.) such as supporting software deployment solution, inventory solution, asset management solution and patch management solution(targeted patching) + Upgrading existing solution to IT Management Suite 8
- Windows Server Support such as patching using WSUS, server performance monitoring, vendor coordination for hardware support, server build activities + File server activities like user share management, group share management, quota management, DFS Shares, monitoring data disk thresholds for high CPU and memory usage + Load balancing of file servers and Software compliance checks
- Network Support such as Wireless Network support, WAN accelerators, alert monitoring tools like CA spectrum, CA eHealth, reporting with Riverbed Steel, Central NetProfiler, VPN Software such as BigIP
Configuration Utility, F5 Load Balancer, checkpoint, Cisco Primer for Data Center Management, voice/video management and IT management
- Office 365 Support such as Administration of Office 365, management of Exchange Admin Center, configuration of Lync Admin Center, deploying ADFS support of Office 365 implementations, OWA and Blackberry support, PowerShell scripting for admin tasks, managing performance related issues, support Skype for Business and Outlook Mail synchronization/Outlook Calendar/Shared Mail Box issues with additional support around OneDrive and SharePoint
Our Solution and Support
Roles and Responsibilities
The roles and responsibilities of the L1/L2 Support Resources includes,
- Independently manage and resolve incidents reported to service desk
- Work with other IT Teams in resolving escalated incidents
- Engage the users on reported incidents and work with them to resolve the issues
- Utilize enterprise tools such as Service Now, Active Directory, KIMS2, MobileIron, and Entrust in effectively dealing with incidents
- Work closely with L2 and L3 teams on problems and change requests
- Support Software and Hardware asset management life cycle and all EUC activities
- Remote support and major incident announcements
Our Approach
Along with our Hybrid Support Model, the following approach has helped us to ensure a continuous and successful support model through our NOC,
- Efforts to understand the nature of incidents by analyzing historical issues, change requests, and other available information
- Team to understand and improve knowledge of the customer's organizational processes, business domain and tools to give better support
- Establish a thoroughly vetted team of experts with required skills based on outcome of assessments and the needs to managing the NOC successfully
- Build interdependent support processes that seamlessly integrate with existing IT protocols and processes
- Proactively establish, agree and manage SLAs on a day-to-day basis
- Generate periodic support matrices that will help in the assessment of performance against SLAs and dentification of improvement opportunities
Support Team Structure
The following was the structure of the NOC team that was supporting the customer's L1/L2 activities,
Customer Benefits
Through Miracle's NOC service model and methodology the customers achieved many business benefits such as,
- Hybrid Support Model - Our teams can offer an Onsite-Offshore support model for the NOC that offers high quality at low costs and allows the customer to focus more on their business
- Cross Trained Resources - Through our methodology we invest time and money into enabling the NOC resources across multiple technologies to ensure that we can reduce costs as we move forward
- A Team that cares and learns - Miracle's Teams thoroughly care about the customer and take the extra effort to understand their processes and business domain to ensure that we can provide the best support possible
- Access to COE and Labs Teams - Through the NOC the customer received access to the COE and Labs Teams which allowed them to think out-of-the-box and receive support in case anything innovative popped up
