Mycroft

Mycroft speaks our clients’ language, whether their concern is dollars and cents or bits and bytes.

Managed Services Overview

Streamlining your IT Management Needs

The pace of IT change is not slowing; in fact, the quantity of new products introduced into the market accelerates annually. Understanding where you are is critical to providing the correct support arrangement, which seamlessly merges with your company services objectives and culture. We work with our clients to manage technology changes, reducing the increasing effort for on-going maintenance and support with streamlined methods and techniques, which produce immediate cost benefits to your organization. Further, our innovation introduces proven techniques for transforming support activities providing benefits throughout the lifecycle of the support engagement.

Fulfilling our vision, Mycroft delivers world class, reliable, and cost-effective services comparable to larger managed services providers, with the personality and responsiveness only available from a truly customer focused service team. Every step of our managed services delivery process results in value; freeing the IT organization to focus on solving critical business issues.

Mycroft Managed IT Services

Through our managed IT services, Mycroft monitors and manages enterprise IT infrastructure, including all or specific applications, networks, servers, storage. These service offerings are provided as project consulting & integration or as a multi-year managed service. Mycroft brings industry leading experience with managing high availability infrastructures, resulting from our engineering skills and experience with providing solutions to financial services industry clients.

Our Specific Managed Services include:

• Remote monitoring and management services from our world-class NOC
• Customer and Technical Help Desk Support
• Service Desk Management for Comprehensive IT Process Support
• Our Fourth generation deployment of Mycroft's business systems, tools and processes
• On-Line Management reporting of performance, trends and asset status with comparison to service level objectives
• Services to address regulatory, company assurance and control requirements, which include asset, configuration and change management controls.
• Information and Operations Projection Assurance provided as a standard part of the Mycroft Highly Secure Operations Center
• Cost Control with consistent monthly fees

Mycroft People & Expertise

Mycroft employs the industry’s very best talent within several technical disciplines. Within the Managed Services discipline, Mycroft has shared and dedicated teams that provide managed services for application and infrastructure, monitoring and management. Mycroft has a dedicated network services and application development team that manages nationwide networks for many customers. While managing 1000s of end-points we leverage several infrastructure technologies from Cisco and other security appliance products. In addition to our Network Service capabilities, Mycroft administers and supports numerous mission critical UNIX, LINIX and Microsoft based platforms.

Mycroft is also trained and skilled at delivering solutions that meet the compliance pressures associated with Sarbanes-Oxley, Payment Card Industry (PCI), Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), and Gramm-Leach Bliley Act (GLBA). Our facility is SAS-70 compliant and designed to meet rigorous audit controls and reviews.

Mycroft also has several application development teams skilled in a variety of languages and systems including Java, HTML, XML, .Net, Oracle, and many others. These teams are recognized for developing mission critical applications under very demanding circumstances with an extremely high on-time delivery rate.

MYCROFT TAP

Core to the Mycroft MS Methodology is our Totally Accountable Party (TAP) concept for Managing Enterprise IT. Utilizing TAP Mycroft assigns highly experienced engineering resources to manage the process, procedure and project results for a given aspect of any Managed Services engagement. Detailed responsibilities include:

• Staging, Build, Configure & Test
• Equipment Inventoried and Shipped
• Installation Documentation and Scheduling
• Installation and Coordination
• Certification Plan, Execution & Turn Over to Operations
• Configuration Administration
• Tier II/III Support

Mycroft Operations Facility

We utilize our carrier-class Operations Center (NOC) in St. Louis providing services 24x7.

The Mycroft Operations Center and Data Center is a world-class facility designed to meet the demands of customers with mission-critical applications. Our facility encompasses 40,000 square feet (20,000 sq ft of conditioned space), and is staffed 7x24x365 for continuous operations.

In addition our facility includes the latest board room and conference room facilities creating an environment for customer demonstration and is often utilized for one-day workout sessions with prospective clients to resolve issues with systems design, architecture, selection, implementation and support.

Our facility includes redundant telecommunication circuits for diversity and is protected by with Uninterruptible Power Supplies (UPS) and a backup diesel generator. Physical security includes secured and controlled access via card readers throughout our facility, with separations between zones in the facility, such as limited access into our Control Room and our Central Operations Room.

Mycroft Operations Management Tools and Applications

Mycroft utilizes many of the industry leading and best of breed products for managing operations, administration and management of your environment. Our suite of tools includes:

• Cisco Works routed WAN and LAN Management Solution
• Cisco TACACS
• Checkpoint
• CA - Concord's eHealth and Live Health Performance Management Software
• CA Wiley
• Crystal Reports
• HP OpenView Service Desk
• HP OpenView Network Node Manager
• HP OpenView Operations
• Zenoss

Single point of contact
Mycroft provides a single point of contact for network, server and application monitoring and management, trouble-ticket management, fault isolation, impact analysis, service restoration, escalation notification, vendor dispatch and management, regularly scheduled back up and disaster recovery testing, network and application change control and maintenance window management, vendor service bulletins and vendor maintenance management.

In addition, our operations management personnel provide an additional layer of escalation, problem analysis and management, vendor management and daily, weekly and monthly reporting on network performance and operations trending.

Mycroft also provides expansive technical support for instances when network or IT challenges dictate greater in-depth knowledge and experience than traditionally found in our clients’ network operating personnel – enabling us to bring customized solutions that immediately diagnose and restore service, regardless of our clients' environmental requirements.

Achieving Efficiency
Mycroft Provides the Mechanism to Achieve Increased Efficiencies of Targeted IT Delivery Processes With Innovation and Transparent Extension to your IT Delivery Organization. Our focus drives the initial inquiries to understand your environment, needs, and priorities:

• How core is each of the IT services and what is the relationship of these services to the strategies and objectives of your organization?
• What is the level of service your IT delivery provides for each of these business objectives? Is this your core competency?
• How would you rank the efficiency (cost effectiveness) of providing these services, when compared to your competition?
• Do your activities directly add value to your company’s customers and if so, how much?
• Can you readily identify areas of IT in need of Transformation?

IT PROCESS MANAGEMENT

Mycroft recognizes that, more than ever, organizations across industries are competing on process rather than product – the critical question being, "How quickly and cost effectively can we complete a specific task?" More often than not, the organization with the better process wins the competitive battle.

Industry leaders such as Southwest Airlines, Starbucks and Costco provide outstanding examples of this: do they have superior products or technology? Not really. What they do have is superior process.

Yet, continuous process improvements can come at the cost of taxing IT organizations. When stress mounts, it's almost inevitable that sooner or later, confusion and chaos will take hold.

That's why Mycroft emphasizes process first, and tools second. We leverage the latest ITIL-based processes and tools to help managers run their IT departments as service-oriented businesses, based on sound processes and operating plans. We have refined our IT process management capabilities over the course of two decades, to the point where we've created proprietary systems, processes and tools based on ITIL best practices, real-world experience and uniquely expert deployment of Industry leading service management tools.

In the end, Mycroft's client-driven approach to IT process management generates the only process-based results that really matter to most organizations: successful project completion, on time and secure.

Mycroft's 4th Generation Process Framework & Toolsets Eliminates Control Gaps in IT Operations

ENTERPRISE NETWORK SERVICES

Even in a 24/7 environment, there are only so many hours in a day; if your IT team is sidetracked by the need to track problems, report errors and monitor assets across your organization, they simply won't have the time to be sufficiently focused on the critical tasks that help ensure consistent network operations.

Mycroft’s Enterprise Network Services solutions are tailored to streamline our clients' IT workload with an enterprise-wide service designed for network planning, deployment and equipment management.

The key features and benefits of Mycroft's Enterprise Network Services include:

Network Architecture and Design—Based on traffic flows, performance and functionality requirements, Mycroft engineers design connectivity and network topologies comprising best-in-class technologies and carrier services.

Network Modeling and Capacity Planning—Mycroft engineers gather application-specific requirements for traffic flows based on source and destinations, peak usage periods and response times along with site specific location information and develop a comprehensive network model and capacity plan used for initial network architecture and design, service and technology procurement and budget unit financial planning.

Vendor Provisioning and Procurement—Key to any IT project is the successful execution, tracking and reporting on vendor specific service and technology purchase orders.

Financial Planning and Vendor Billing Reconciliation—Includes financial analysis, budget plan creation, monthly variance reporting and vendor specific reconciliation and bill payment.

Equipment & Software Staging—Ensures the pre-configuration, testing, labeling and documentation on all site specific network equipment deployments.

Asset Tracking, Inventory Management and Logistics Control—Tracking via database all equipment and software assets from the order procurement process, through movement in and out of inventory and final shipping and receiving processes, ensures financial controls and accountability.

Network Deployment Engineering—Mycroft introduces the Totally Accountable Party concept to its Network Services projects by assigning highly experienced engineering resources to manage the process, procedure and project results for a given aspect of and IT engagement.

Network Monitoring and Operations—This 7 x 24 x 365 day per year organization uses 'best in class' IT systems, tools and processes to monitor, detect, fault isolate, restore, escalate, track and report on service delivery for the most sophisticated networking and communications platforms deployed today.

Technical Support—An important organizational function relied upon when IT problems traverse multiple application software or equipment boundaries.

Customer Support—A highly customizable organization that provides for the first point of contact from end user clients, customer contact and trouble ticket management, along with initial problem determination and potential resolution.

Would you like to learn more? Contact Us!