"Nothing is permanent in this wicked world. Not even our troubles."
Cruxen provides services mainly to customers in the Euro Area and ocasionally may cover the entire EMEA region (Europe Middle East and Africa) on some specific engagements.
Technical support provided by Cruxen includes architecture analysis, troubleshooting, case tracking information and break/fix to project-based engagements thanks to agreements with industry most recognized leaders.
Responsiveness – Appreciation and respect for the needs of our clients and all internal and external factors that impact network deployment and operations. Our primary goal is to provide services that result in practical solutions addressing the requirements of the organizations we work with.
Although any SLAs to be put in place will depend on the contract to be agreed, Cruxen typical response to the issues depends on how critical those are, according to the following classification:
C1: Critical – i.e.: Catastrophic impact to mission critical functionality Total loss or continuous instability of mission critical functionality - Network or system is down causing users to experience a total loss of service • Inability to use a feature or functionality that is currently relied upon for mission critical functionality Response: Immediate, typically, within minutes. Resources are dedicated until resolution or workaround in place
C2: High - i.e.: Significant impact to mission critical functionality Loss of redundancy of critical hardware component or intermittent issues that affect mission critical functionality - Issues that are impairing, but not a total loss of mission critical functionality Response – Very Urgent, typically within a couple of hours. Resources are made available as appropriate until resolution or workaround in place
C3: Medium - i.e.: Minimal impact to business operations Non-repeated issues that have impacted mission critical functionality but have since recovered, issues seen in a test or pre-production environment that would normally cause adverse impact to a production network, Issues in the network or on the system that are not causing impact to missing critical functionality or non-urgent RMA requests Response – Urgent, typically within hours or in the next business day. Resources are made available as appropriate until resolution or workaround in place
C4: i.e.: Low Enhancement Request Adding a protocol or configuring a feature to an existing product Response: Immediate acknowledgement of issue and implementation as scheduled
"The Internet is the first thing that humanity has built that humanity doesn´t understand, the largest experiment in anarchy that we have ever had."
Cruxen understands the SLAs to apply as the result of a cyclic job that constantly needs to be adapted according to the following ongoing changes:
- From the Core side - New resources being constantly added
- From the edge side – New users and users rotation / mobility
With the above in mind, a number of actions are part of a daily routine which encompasses the following actions is defined below:
- Architecture design and definition setup or adapt – This is fundamental to make sure network is properly responding and providing the necessary services to both users and resources. Enable or adapt policies to allow incorporating user changes and new applications
- Detect & Locate – Enable applications and procedures to detect anomalies and potential risks
- Respond & Remediate – Correct failures and potential weaknesses by hardening the services
- Proactive prevention / Architecture redesign – (as per the first step and so on) by enabling / fine tuning features to prevent issues
The process above is a cycle under continuous operation, as the needs continuously change
"In order for the light to shine so brightly, the darkness must be present."
A complete network monitoring solution may be put in place to get sensitive information from all network devices.This solution may provide the following functionality:
Real time network status and usage.
History of network status and usage.
Availability summary.
One of the most important tools will be the existing (or new) management tool as it may be set to export some data toCruxen tools. Thanks to this, CUSTOMER and Cruxen should be able to track operations and business service levels,and forecast violations with warning alerts.
The following table indicates an example on some of the metrics which may be important to look while considering anySLA reporting:
Technical and Service metrics |
Levels (Example for a healthy network) |
|---|---|
|
Average System Availability |
99.95% |
|
Average Network Response |
5 ms |
|
Backbone Usage |
< 15% |
|
System incident / Problems |
4 hours resp. - 8 hours resolution time |
In order to implement this SLA, it will be key to deploy together with youa change process methodology, where Cruxenis part of such process. Some optional additional time may be agreed, in order to take many of these operation tasksunder Cruxen responsibility in a regular basis.
"Delay is the deadliest form of denial."
If your organization has to do more with fewer resources, maybe we can help by stationing a Cruxen engineer at your location to provide service and support. This assignment may be partial or full time to work as part of your team, managing your infrastructure and performing many important day-to-day networking activities for your organization.
Alternatively, a remote monitoring service may be setup for you.
Either way, these resources are meant to work together with your team, serving as a bridge to the vendor Engineering and therefore saving costs and time on multiple areas:
Preventive maintenance – by identifying in advance potential risks and addressing it in advanceCorrective actions – by hardening configurations and / or replacing defective components, having for this purpose spares as agreed while defining an SLA
The main concept behind this service is to avoid all the interim steps between your team and the product manufacturer engineering, saving this way a significant amount of time and money.
"Better than a thousand days of diligent study, is one day with a great teacher."
Cruxen may provide you with on-going professional development that ensures the required expertise and use of effective tools, practices and solutions.
While Cruxen may offer you as well a specific vendor class, we can provide you with training classes, focused on practical, hands-on learning that´´s relevant to supporting, operate and optimizing your specific network.
The idea behind it, is to make sure you get what you need to develop your team skills to maximize the performance of your network and better meet your business needs. You and your team will learn the skills to successfully deploy and manage your network in your environment.
We also offer a number of certification levels, so you can choose the correct amount of training to suit your business goals.
Feel free to contact us in order to let us know about your specific needs. Once we better understand what would be the target population, the location, the basis and expectations, we can build a plan including any labs that may be required is such is deemed to be appropriate.
"Our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal."
Cruxen offers multiple options in support of on-going management of your network. These solutions can include such things as quarterly optimization efforts, firmware reviews, and reliability testing, or can go as far as having Cruxen employee’s onsite at your location augmenting IT staff and providing a direct link to Cruxen engineering.
There are many flavors of Managed Services and the right one for you may be customized by Cruxen.
It may be as light as remote monitoring (through a NOC), providing technical resources to be onsite a certain amount of time per agreed period, or it may be as sophisticated where we supply you with our gear and crew to operate it, being you responsible only for a period fee (limited to OPEX while eliminating any CAPEX).
In other words, it may range from the situation where you only hire a certain amount of ports, features and SLAs to a simple component complementing your own capabilities.
You decide what you need and we will make it happen
Problem - Peace of mind
Solution - Comprehensive coverage can include deployment, monitoring, remote support and Uptime granted by an SLA
Problem - Budget
Solution - Per port pricing, sophisticated networking to get the most out of the investment by selecting the longest lifecycles in the industry. Also, Opex vs. Capital
Problem - Limited IT staff
Solution - Improved combination of Onsite + Remote management
Problem - Network Performance
Solution - Monitoring capabilities, processes to maximize bandwidth where you need it
Problem - Scalability
Solution - Flexible solutions allowing changes on the edge but keeping the Core and Distribution aligned to keep SLAs