IT Infrastructure Management

Improve availability by diagnosing issues before they affect network and security health

Businesses today face a considerable challenge to deliver ever-improving service levels to meet and exceed the expectations of their business users for service quality, availability, and security while optimizing resources and operations costs to manage and maintain the IT infrastructure.

Monitoring and managing these increasingly complex infrastructures is a growing problem. Existing management solutions are piecemeal, requiring too many applications and vendors to monitor the environment - complicating problem resolution. In addition, many management tools require multi-domain experience and specialized expertise -resources that many organizations simply do not have.

The CIOs' main challenge is to offload the increasingly time-intensive task of infrastructure and device management, increasing the overall availability of network resources to support broader use of converged technologies like voice over IP (VoIP) and video as well as maintain & control visibility using compliance audits for seamless operations.

Virtela's IT Infrastructure Management service meets three increasingly critical IT strategy elements.  First, companies are able to leverage service partners to offload operations and management of core IT infrastructure and processes, including networks, their related equipment, and corresponding IT services like security.  Secondly, it accelerates identification and resolution before they impact the business, reducing Time-to-Repair and strain on IT resources.  Lastly, integration of audit logs with existing compliance tools helps companies meet compliance requirements; network discovery and inventory helps optimize maintenance contracts; and network modeling helps further reduce downtime by modeling changes before they are made.

With Virtela's IT Infrastructure Management service, companies:

• Achieve a more reliable and available global IT infrastructure
• Regain control of their IT infrastructure
• Get better service guarantees with the shift from Mean-Time-to-Repair (MTTR) to Actual-Time-to-Repair (TTR) to offer the world's first TTR SLA
• Free up in-house staff to focus on more strategic projects

"Virtela is truly an extension of my IT staff, providing advanced skills and technologies to proactively manage our global multivendor IT infrastructure.  Virtela often fixes issues before our IT staff or end users are even aware of them, giving them consistently better performance and enabling us to shift our IT focus from operational infrastructure reaction to proactive and advance planning execution."

Bharat Poria, Senior Director of Information Technology, Natus Medical Incorporated, a leading provider of healthcare products

Key Features and Benefits

Enterprises can achieve significant benefits from Virtela's IT Infrastructure Management service:

• Predictive Analytics. Using VirtelaPredict technology, IT Infrastructure Management service is able to diagnose more than 95% of potential enterprise network and security issues before they can impact network health. By speeding resolution of issues - or avoiding them altogether - the service enables enterprises to achieve a more reliable IT infrastructure.  Virtela's IT Infrastructure Management service provides a way to efficiently analyze data, ensuring:
  • that major issues affecting availability are prevented before they occur,
  • that recurring bottlenecks are proactively investigated,
  • that issues are responded to and remediated before they cause an outage
  • that automatic configuration analytics; compliance, audit; proactive network tuning are taken cared of
• Fully Managed Service Available in 190 countries. Virtela provides a full lifecycle of end-to-end managed network services, from design and implementation to change management and compliance.  Virtela serves as a single point of contact worldwide for proactive management of a wide array of multivendor IT infrastructure - including WAN, LAN, IP telephony, application acceleration, and security devices - regardless of whether it resides within headquarters, branch offices, private or public clouds. Virtela's world-class Network and Security Operations Centers perform 24x7 predictive modeling, monitoring, and management with hands-on expertise across best-in-class technologies, delivering a superior end user experience on a global basis.  The service typically reduces operations costs by eliminating the need for multiple management platforms, refocusing existing IT resources on core business functions rather than managing the IT infrastructure, and taking advantage of the inherent efficiencies of a cloud-based service.
• Actual-Time-to-Repair SLA. Virtela offers the world's first Actual-Time-to-Repair SLA, a shift from the traditional Mean-Time-to-Repair guarantees prevalent in the market today.  Conventional MTTR SLAs are based on an average of many incidents across devices; companies can experience an extended outage of one critical site or device that seriously impacts operations yet does not constitute an SLA violation. Virtela's TTR SLA uniquely guarantees the actual time to repair each device or service, resulting in much more meaningful penalties should companies experience significant performance degradation or outages.
• Audit and Compliance. The service provides centralized control of access to all devices, keeps an audit trail of all individual user logins, applies role-based discretionary access control, and is configured to mask device credentials from the user. It also features the ability to trigger an alert if unauthorized network changes take place. Integration of Virtela's audit logs with existing compliance reporting tools better enable customers to meet various compliance requirements.
• Network discovery and inventory management. The service enables enterprises to automatically identify all devices within their environment and view the topology within their Virtela dashboard.  This assists with rightsizing equipment maintenance spend, for example, enabling companies to more easily identify equipment that may be without maintenance contracts but would benefit from them, as well as equipment that may have unnecessary maintenance contracts.
• Network modeling. The service enables modeling the impact of configuration changes to the network before they are made, further reducing risk of downtime by avoiding common mistakes due to human error.

The Virtela Advantage

With more than a decade's worth of incident, resolution and management data on IT infrastructure issues, Virtela leveraged this information and its experience to build technology, VirtelaPredict, to diagnose problems before they impact network health.  This self-learning system inherently becomes more intelligent as it continuously correlates and analyzes more information.  VirtelaPredict is uniquely optimized to solve problems at a multi-dimensional, end-to-end service level, rather than just at the specific component or device level.  It is synchronized with all components and has knowledge of changes and incidents that can impact the entire solution.  This is how Virtela improves performance and availability, saves costs, and delivers the world's first TTR SLAs.