The Aldridge Company's Managed Services can include complete management of servers, routers, switches, racks, and cabinets. All equipment covered in this solution is part of the Aldridge Monitoring System; any faults and/or failures are responded to immediately and corrective action is taken immediately. The proper management of all nodes in the managed network is critical to success of any company’s operation. Whether your equipment is located in The Aldridge Data Center, or in any other facility, our team of qualified system administrators will keep your system performing optimally.
With The Aldridge Company's Managed Services Solution, you can expect availability, stability, and usability of the server and hosting environment. Prompt, accurate, and professional attention is our standard of support. Your organization will benefit from this type of service from a company that's easy to reach and has IT Specialists and Systems Engineers dedicated to complete availability and total satisfaction. Our technical team is strategically built with members that have experience in different disciplines of Information Technology. Your organization will have the benefit of the knowledge of each of these individuals as if each was an employee of your organization.
Our Managed Services Solution gives you the flexibility to choose all or any one of the following services (click for details):
Server & System Management & Support
The Aldridge Company will be responsible for complete server management, as it relates to the operating system, applications, and services on the servers associated with and covered by our service. Additionally, OS Management and regular updates are included.
- Architecture & Design
- Review end-user system requirements and recommend appropriate architecture
- Define Aldridge security requirements and recommend/implement recommendations
- Implementation
- Configure OS tunable parameters to Aldridge standards
- Create new OS users as necessary
- Implement supported system software products
- Implement logical system security controls
- Implement physical security controls
- Maintenance
- Adjust memory management services as needed
- Review, internally test, and make available tested patches
- Implement tested system and application patches
- Identify and diagnose hardware failures
- Schedule relevant hardware maintenance tasks
- Test components that have received maintenance
- Track spare parts requirements / availability
- Manage third party hardware maintenance vendors
- Monitor performance adjustments for their effectiveness
- Maintain system level passwords
- Maintain resource profiles
- Review supported vendor software upgrades to determine applicability
- Evaluate impact on upgrades to infrastructure
- Monitor release status – determine business requirement for execution
- Implement vendor software/firmware upgrades after testing
- Test software/firmware upgrades for internal compatibility
Monitoring Services & Data Center
The Aldridge Company Data Center will be responsible for monitoring the network for alarms and certain conditions which may require special attention to avoid or minimize impact on the network or server performance.
- Architecture & Design
- Determine requirements for monitoring
- Map requirements to capabilities of monitoring tools and practices
- Review the availability of new software solutions in the monitoring arena
- Build processes to collect monitoring data into a usable repository
- Implementation
- Collect relevant customer information from systems and infrastructure
- Install, configure, and tune monitoring tools
- Configure notifications trees into monitoring tools
- Activate the monitoring processes
- Document OS / server startup / shutdown procedures
- Maintenance
- Ensure availability of monitoring stations 24x7x365
- Monitor console for event notification
- Detect events
- Indicate event resolution activities
- Chronicle resolution activities
- Follow-up communication to involved parties
- Post-resolution environment validation
- Log events
- Determine elements affected by an event
- Define work-around if possible
- Perform fault diagnosis and testing
- Escalate support according to defined escalation processes for fault correction
- Correct faults
- Test system after correction
- Clear alarms
- Notify / Report outages (if necessary)
- Perform scheduled startup/shutdown of OS, Hardware
- Perform scheduled start/shutdown of applications
- Restart the Hardware/OS after failure
- Follow application recovery/startup procedures after failure
- Monitor the success/failure of the startup/shutdown processes - Scheduled
- Monitor the success/failure of the shutdown processes – Non-Scheduled
- Coordinate recovery of data and processes to a known, consistent state after failure
- Monitor the availability of maintenance, emergency patches, upgrades and additional components of the monitoring system
- Plan and schedule the implementation of suitable maintenance, emergency patches, upgrades and applications
- Ensure the health of the Data Center servers
- Evaluate the effectiveness of the hardware/network configurations to meet the demands of monitoring
- Plan and schedule any upgrades and/or reconfigurations of the NOC servers
Network & Data Center Management
The Aldridge Company is responsible for all areas of network management in the Data Center.
- Architecture & Design
- Document and diagram network facilities
- Develop and implement network address and naming conventions
- Estimate and procure necessary upstream Internet bandwidth
- Design and engineer infrastructure
- Implementation
- Procure, implement, and maintain networking equipment and software
- Implement and maintain logical security controls (router level, firewall, etc)
- Implement Virtual Private Networks (if requested)
- Set up and maintain primary/secondary Domain Name Services (DNS) – Authoritative
- Set up and maintain primary/secondary Domain Name Services (DNS) – Recursive
- Implement load balancing for some services (when applicable and needed)
- Configure network time synchronization service
- Maintenance
- Manage problems related to your organization's upstream provider(s) Local and Wide Area Network
- Manage access requests and firewall configurations
- Manage and redesign logical and physical connections
- Manage and procure switch port capacity
- Manage and procure network processing capacity
- Manage, re-engineer, and procure upstream Internet connectivity
- Manage and procure IP address space
- Manage load balancing for some services
- Manage carriers/suppliers as applicable to the network
- Ensure network compliance to security policies
- Maintain and periodically test redundant connections
Network Security
The Aldridge Company will be responsible for the security and integrity of your organization’s network contributing to data reliability and availability.
- Architecture & Design
- Maintain current awareness of security risks and exposures
- Develop and implement Aldridge security policies and procedures
- Implementation
- Approve data, system and remote access to secure locations
- Initial compliance and penetration testing
- Maintenance
- Internally scan for servers that are out of compliance with security policies
- Monitor security plan for its effectiveness
- Incident response
- Liaise with fellow-abuse departments of other companies, law enforcement, and upstream security departments
- Monitor security standards for effectiveness for Microsoft/Unix server hardware and operating system
- Monitor for customer data-space exploits and control exploits effects on the performance of the server and other customer delivery
- Review all Access Control Lists (ACLs) on servers, firewalls, and routers for effective control over access and administrative rights
Provisioning Services
The Aldridge Company will work with your organization to provide support to sales efforts and provide fully provisioned hardware/software to meet your goals and deadlines.
- Architecture & Design
- Technical Architecture Design
- Configuration Generation
- Implementation
- Detailed Technical Architecture Review
- Detailed Technical Configuration Generation
- Project Plan Creation
- Procurement of necessary equipment and software
- Status Updates
- Project Management
- Environment Build (physical and logical)
- Management of associated change requests
- Deliver for Customer review and acceptance
- Migration of customer data if necessary
- Full client transition to new system
Data Assurance
Your organization can chose to complete backups on critical components of your data network. The Aldridge Company will manage the data assurance of these critical components.
- Architecture & Design
- Determine your organization's definition of critical components and requirements to produce best storage design within parameters defined by your organization
- Identify backup strategies required to deliver stated requirements, including special clients, local scripts, application integration, and authorized agents
- Apply strategies to the capabilities of the existing infrastructure to validate strategies
- Annually review the availability of new backup solutions
- Implementation
- Implement requisite changes to infrastructure
- Configure backup classes, clients, media pools, and schedules
- Maintenance
- Review execution of scheduled backup/vaulting jobs
- Investigate and determine cause for any job failures. Revise configuration when needed
- Re-initiate failed jobs when appropriate
- Label backup media
- Maintain backup library
- Determine the availability of recovering data
- Verify availability of hardware resources prior to restoration
- Determine scope of recovery (if needed)
- Perform restoration of data
- Verify restoration of systems, data, and core applications
- Validate (if possible) application state after completed restore, run checkout procedures
Change Management & Operational Processes
To contribute to the highest levels of service availability, The Aldridge Company will manage and control the processes through which changes are made to the environment.
- Architecture & Design
- Develop and maintain change management systems and processes
- Implementation
- Follow established change management processes and procedures
- Maintenance
- Manage the change control process
- Provide risk assessment of change
- Approve change requests
- Schedule change requests
- Notify proper contacts of changes
- Perform change requests
- Update documentation of changes
- Report on status of change requests
- Coordinate testing of change
- Validate success of change and roll back as required or as possible.
The Aldridge Company will assume first-response responsibility for your organization's network and server environment. This will allow your organization to focus on the acquisition of new businesses and new clients and trust that solid IT infrastructure is in place and handled by experienced IT professionals dedicated to the success of your organization.
Server & System Management & Support
