Managed IT services
APH Managed IT Services – at the heart of your business
APH is one of the North West’s leading managed services providers (MSP) with our head office in Manchester and resources nationwide, we deliver managed IT support and services across the UK including London.
IT is at the heart of all businesses. It acts as a cornerstone – an integral element that ensures all parts of the business can function properly. As a crucial cog within the company machine, it needs to be managed properly. An ineffective – or worse – malfunctioning infrastructure can have a serious impact on an organisation’s output.
What can you do to ensure your IT infrastructure is always performing at the optimum level? Taking care of IT in-house can be a serious drain on resources, which is why many organisations (of all shapes and sizes) are choosing to invest in APH managed services.
There is a common misconception that choosing to outsource some, or all of the management of your IT infrastructure is for larger enterprises, but by its modular and flexible nature – APH Managed IT Services are suitable for companies of all shapes and sizes.
The APH Managed IT Service Portfolio
Our portfolio of managed services promises to reduce IT complexity, lower system maintenance, and management costs and significantly improve the value organisations derive from their technology investments.
Our managed services give you access to a wealth of skills and expertise that ensure you can focus on driving your business forward whilst your infrastructure and critical applications are managed by specialists.
We take a flexible approach to support services and offer different types of managed services:
- Managed IT Support Care
- Business Continuity
- Managed Hosted
Our ITIL-aligned service desk team functions as an extension of your in-house facility. We deliver dedicated, high quality service and technical support to customers through a multi-level team of experts supported by robust incident and problem management process and procedures.
Our comprehensive SLAs range from Priority 1 to 3. Up to 75% of incidents are identified by our staff, assessed and resolved with no interaction from the customer, freeing up your team to concentrate on delivering business value to your end users.
APH’s Managed IT Support Care services are designed to meet the demands of our clients and respond to today’s environment and challenges. We recognise that different clients have different support requirements, so we have developed two support care services: Essential and Premium.
The following features are available as part of APH Managed IT Support Care:
- Physical and virtual machines
- LAN and WAN connectivity
- Storage
- Routers
- Switches
- Firewalls
- UPS and Access Control Services
Security assurance
We provide extensive reporting to monitor the security of your entire network. This includes continuous monitoring and alerting for viruses, malware and attempted network access by unauthorised users. Patching of inventory ensures your operating systems remain up to date and are never exposed to vulnerabilities.
Regular business reviews
We discuss the overall health and performance of your IT assets, as well as new opportunities to get the most from your investments. Our regular business reviews ensure that your IT systems remain in line with your business objectives and help you to forecast future budgets.
When putting together your business continuity plan, it’s essential to remember that IT underpins your entire business. It’s the backbone of your company. Without the correct backups, infrastructure and plan in place you could find that if disaster strikes – your business can’t recover. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) states that almost 40 percent of small businesses never reopen their doors after a disaster. And if you do survive the incident, then the average cost of downtime is £4,300 per minute according to Gartner with more than just your bottom line affected.
APH ensures you’re prepared for every eventuality. We can provide an appropriate backup and disaster recovery solution- whether that’s on-premise or cloud-based – as a fully managed service, giving you peace of mind should the worst happen. Our Managed Backup service, can be up and running within 24 hours. We now have an Office 365 Backup as a Service solution available.
The decision to move to a secure hosted environment with predictable costs and easy scalability is an easy one for many of our clients.
Cost effective hosting agreements are available for a wide range of requirements starting from just a single user and upwards.
Our Managed Hosting Service offers dedicated server hosting where a client can lease an entire server for their sole use. This service is more flexible than shared server hosting as organisations have full control over the server and do not share bandwidth with any other party. This is perfect for organisations that require hosting for busy or operation critical applications, such as ERP (Enterprise Resource and Planning) software.
- Customer centric service model
- Flexible service options
- Improves agility
- 24/7 monitored with pre-agreed SLAs
- Guaranteed uptime
- Cutting edge hosting environment
Maximise your Office 365 investment with managed services and enterprise-class support for Office 365.
We take the complexity out of deploying and managing Office 365 across organisations. We help companies harness the power of Office 365 with less of a burden on in-house IT resources.
Our Microsoft-certified experts are highly adept at managing, monitoring and administering the Office 365 environment, ensuring that your users benefit from the software’s full feature set.
- Focus on strategic initiatives: Our administrators reduce the ongoing administrative burden of managing and monitoring your O365 environment thereby freeing your team up to focus on strategic business initiatives.
- Access to expertise: Easily accessible support from a dedicated team of Office 365 specialists. We can also aid user adoption for all features.
- Simple migration: We are able to assist with email migration, setup and deployment with as little disruption to normal operations as possible.
- Single point of entry: Submit tickets by calling, emailing, web portal, or via automated systems alerts to our Service Desk. We are the single point of contact for all IT support.
- Service level agreements (SLAs): We’re committed and accountable. We regularly review SLA metrics and KPI insight to verify the ROI of the Service Desk.
- Change management: we are able to assist with product changes and upgrades in Office 365, regular account reviews and coaching
Why outsource to a managed services provider? Read the APH blog on the top ten reasons to outsource Managed IT Services.
By outsourcing some or part of an IT infrastructure to APH our clients experience a range of benefits, both in the short term and longer term.
Mitigating risk
With research showing up to 70% of self manged infrastructure system down incidents are caused by human error, trusting your support services to APH mitigates that risk.
The layer of support that we provide on a pre-agreed SLA provides our clients with peace of mind that any issue can be located and swiftly. Whether it’s a problem with the network, or a faulty telephone line, levels of availability and functionality are much higher with our dedicated managed service – all coupled with a single point of contact for ease of access.
Fixed monthly costs
By outsourcing some or all of your IT infrastructure management, you can manage your operational and labour costs in a much more foreseeable manner. From how you are billed (monthly maintenance costs for example) to how you can free up expensive IT resource to focus on more value-add tasks – our services allow you to get a real return on investment.
Widening in-house expertise
Dovetailing the broad and deep skillsets that an MSP can provide with internal resource of a client is another benefit. Rather than a straight replacement of an IT team (which is often a misplaced fear of outsourcing), it is a complementary relationship which often comes into play when organisations struggle with holiday and sickness cover; recruitment pains and expense or a specific skills gap for a particular project or problem.
Staff productivity
The average IT department spends 80% of its time keeping the business going, with only 20% of its resources dedicated to innovation and strategic improvements. Businesses need to reverse this.
By delegating responsibility to APH, you can move away from areas that are time consuming, difficult to manage and control and that provide little in the way of instant benefit. IT resource is freed up to focus on areas that can aid business growth. A service contract with APH also moves in-house IT away from reactive problem solving which can prove disruptive to other ongoing tasks.
Flexibility
Our managed services model can be tailored to meet your business needs – be it objective, budget or project driven; with elements of service provision able to be switched on and off. The physical equipment can remain on premise or in our managed hosted environment.
You can choose what parts of your infrastructure you want to outsource. From email and telephony to LANs and WANs, you can even place the entirety of your IT system in our hands. Our service is bespoke, it’s scalable and it’s flexible.
A customer-centric approach to service
All members of the APH team are dedicated to delivering an excellent customer service experience. Every employee takes a hands-on approach to problem resolution, working with each customer to better understand their business needs and to help them continue to evolve and grow with support from APH.
Access to technical expertise
We have a team of highly accredited engineers and consultants who can offer advice on both strategic and tactical areas such as business continuity planning, how to reduce on-going capital and support costs through cloud solutions, and how to extend your workplace with mobile infrastructures.
Flexible, modular approach tailored to your budget
We offer a range of enterprise level services accessible to small and medium sized businesses. We can work with you to tailor the service to meet your budget, objectives and technology model. It’s not a case of either in-house or outsourced. You can choose a hybrid model – to invest in managed services for whichever components you wish, while keeping in-house the elements that you can manage effectively.
Critical application expertise (SAP)
Our clients find it reassuring that we have extensive experience delivering SAP Business One installations and supporting critical applications. We appreciate high availability of ERP software is a business essential and as such we often support our SAP clients’ entire infrastructures, as well as their applications.