Space Age Technologies (SAT), well known for the inception of the preventative operations management service, SATOps, recently decided to launch its proactive system monitoring component as a separate and independent service offering aimed at providing 24x7 monitoring services to large companies, and especially within the distributed infrastructure market.
"We were approached by companies looking to expand their current system management service to include the 24x7 monitoring of system health but did not have the infrastructure or resources to manage it internally," says Mark Geschke, MD of SAT.
While SAT has incorporated the proactive monitoring service as part of its service agreements for the past three years, very little has been done by the ICT industry to accommodate enterprise businesses in terms of outsourced system monitoring.
"We found that many mid-sector IT managers were constantly looking for a more economical way to include 24x7 system monitoring as a routine task, but constraints in resources and appropriate applications hampered the realisation thereof," says Geschke.
The SATOps Framework, based on Microsoft's Operations Framework, was designed as a complete and all-encompassing operations management service that quickly awarded SAT recognition as a leader in the field of proactive system management. "The demand for 24x7 monitoring among larger companies is constantly growing. We have responded by providing them with a dependable monitoring service which puts them in control of their own proactive services."
Cape Town-based online travel and tour organiser, Go2Africa, is but one company reaping the benefits from SAT's 24x7 monitoring service. "The availability of our mail and data servers is of critical value to everyday business processes," says Mark Preyer, CEO for Go2Africa. "As little as an hour downtime would definitely cause great damage to our business, we therefore need to be aware of problems before they manifest themselves in our system, and this is exactly why we chose SAT. Irregularities are reported to our internal IT department which can then prevent serious system failures or interruption to our systems at any time of day."
SAT's monitoring system extracts important event information from the client's server and filters them according to predefined criticality factors. "After-hours alerts are generated by critical events such as the failure of the firewall, Exchange or database related services," says Geschke. Non-critical events can also generate warnings, as is the case when computer browser elections are 'randomly' enforced or licence limits are reached. Such instances often do not result in immediate problems, but SAT is able to notify the client to proactively respond in order to avoid bigger problems from occurring in the short-term future.
When asked what differentiates SAT from other IT management providers, Geschke proudly commented that SAT is able to work in alliance with existing IT providers or internal departments without being perceived as a threat or competition. "While more and more IT providers are entering the proactive sphere, a space which SAT has been fulfilling for the past three years, I believe that SAT is in a unique position to offer real-time business value, a solid return on investment and a boost to the bottom line."
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