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An overview of our excellent management services
Virtually every organisation now relies heavily on their information technology (IT) investment. While this has provided many benefits, there can be a downside. Disruption of your IT infrastructure, for whatever reason, can trigger drastic and sometimes fatal consequences for your organisation. To ensure a continued and high-level business performance IT managed services are critically important.
Lanway managed services minimise the burden of running your IT infrastructure and help you to align the IT function with the business. This delivers a secure, trouble-free and cost-effective business computing environment.
Key partnerships
To enable us to deliver industry leading services and solutions, we have partnered with the leading technology manufacturers, including:
| Microsoft | Samsung | GFI |
| Cisco | Sage | CA |
| Hewlett Packard | Sony |
| 3Com | Toshiba |
Our wealth of experience with the technologies of these manufacturers, together with our in-house specialist resources allow us to offer a comprehensive portfolio of cost-effective and technically sound managed services.
Accredited consultants
Our consultants and engineers are continually trained to the exacting standards required by our partners. This has enabled us to achieve the highest accreditations available, such as Microsoft Gold Certified Partner.
This level of investment in our staff is our guarantee that we will always be able to provide you with exceptional levels of service as well as keeping you up to date with the latest IT developments and strategic advice.
Lanway MyPortal
MyPortal is a unique service only available to Lanway customers and is the core of our managed services proposition. It is a completely remote, IT management system that provides all the information you need about your hardware, software and servicing.
It takes care of simple tasks, freeing your time to focus on more business critical issues. MyPortal offers a unique area to log and view recent or historical support incident details and is easily securely accessible via the Internet from any Web-enabled device.
Technology reviews & evaluation
It is vital that organisations implement IT strategies that match the mission, goals and objectives of their business. This means keeping up to date with the latest technology developments as well as emerging threats to your IT infrastructure. However, internal IT staff have to deal with issues relating to the day-to-day running of the business, leaving them little time for such strategic activity.
Lanway can help determine your current strategic situation and help you develop new strategies that use technology to provide real advantages to your organisation by:
| Increasing competitive advantage - utilising technology to provide a real competitive advantage e.g. e-commerce and supply chain efficiencies or simply by freeing up your staff's time to spend on strategy or other business development areas |
| Improving efficiency and productivity - finding ways to utilise your IT investment more efficiently and identifying areas where you can make cost reductions e.g. server consolidation or inventory reduction |
| Reducing downtime - detecting any areas of weakness that could potentially cause downtime leading to improved profitability and bottom-line benefits e.g. designing, supplying and installing resilient and fault-tolerant solutions |
| Exposing network and data security threats - such as hacking, viruses or Spam e.g. identifying potential areas of data theft or providing integrated security solutions to protect your IT assets |
| Business process re-engineering - to take full advantage of new technology and ensure it can be utilised as a resource at the heart of all business processes within your organisation |
| Improved investment strategies - giving you a better understanding of your current and future technology investment e.g. measuring and improving ROI and reducing the TCO of your IT investment |
| Offering greater control - by implementing polices, procedures and controls e.g. by utilising technology to automate and improve the efficiency of all processes within your organisation |
Consultancy & infrastructure planning
The task of planning an optimised and integrated technology infrastructure is a complex process. Integrating diverse technologies and products that allow for the more flexible and mobile working practices of the 21st century places great pressure on many organisations.
It is simply not possible for internal IT staff to keep up to date with all the latest advancements in technology and potential threats to the IT infrastructure. That is why it makes sense to partner with an organisation that can provide these skills and experience.
Lanway are experts in the design, implementation and support of integrated solutions that enable your business to maximise its investment in IT. We can provide infrastructure solutions for organisations that have tens or thousands of users.
Our infrastructure planning services cover multi-vendor networks and management systems. We can provide an analysis of the low-level design of your current configuration and offer recommendations based on industry best-practices.
Our experienced consultants can help minimise time-consuming redesign and ensure the success of your deployment by reviewing your design, or provide complete design services from scratch.
Implementation and configuration
Assessing your business needs and designing your IT strategy to fit them is only the first part of the job. The complete solution now needs to be assembled, configured and installed in-situ. This requires a comprehensive and up to date knowledge of the fast-changing IT market, coupled with an extensive technical experience to ensure all the components work seamlessly together.
From hardware and software, through to telecommunications and cabling you need to be an expert in many disciplines to ensure you are getting the maximum return on your technology investment.
Lanway will take ownership of this problem. We provide a comprehensive portfolio of implementation and configuration services including:
| Hardware configuration |
| Software setup |
| Implementation plan with a user migration and system changeover strategy |
| Comprehensive system testing including acceptance testing |
| Producing detailed documentation such as procedures and configuration diagrams to ensure that the customer is able to effectively operate the installed system following project completion |
| Ongoing support and maintenance |
| Specialised implementation and configuration services |
Network & security healthchecks
With the increasing dependence organisations now place on their IT systems comes a greater security risk. The information you hold on your computers is of interest to criminals and other miscreants, and their capability to break into your data and cause you harm has never been higher.
But there is even a greater risk posed from within - your own employees.
If they are allowed to surf the Internet, download files or send e-mails that can be traced back to your organisation, you run a high risk from virus attack and legal liability for offensive material entering or leaving your IT system.
These threats are real and, if left unchecked, can have damaging consequences for the organisation's routine operations and its reputation, as well leading to costly law suits.
Lanway are able to offer a range of healthchecks including:
| Network - a complete examination of the processes involved in the running of an organisation's IT system. The aim is to find out where improvements can be made and to ensure the organisation is getting full value for its IT expenditure |
| Security - to help you understand the weakness in your existing setup and enable us to advise on policies and procedures that will secure your critical data and systems - both internally and externally |
VPN & Firewalls
A Virtual Private Network (VPN) is a method of using the Internet to provide remote offices or individuals with secure access to your network. A VPN can be contrasted with an expensive system of owned or leased telephone lines that can only be used by one organisation. The goal of a VPN is to provide the same capabilities, but at a much lower cost.
By implementing a VPN you will find it much easier to enable home and mobile working for your employees, as well as keeping branch offices in touch. This way, you can locate your staff in the most productive environment to increase your profitability and raise their job satisfaction. They will still be able to quickly and securely access all their applications and data as if they were present in the office.
Lanway have designed and implemented both site-to-site and remote access VPNs to organisations of all types and sizes. We can provide a full range of AAA (Authentication, Authorisation and Accounting) management controls to ensure that your critical data and applications remain secure at all times.
We also provide integrated perimeter security solutions that allow your organisation to safely utilise the Internet both within the context of a VPN and independently.
Convergence technology
Voice and data technologies are rapidly converging leading to the transmission of both over a single communications network. The benefits that such a unified network offers include:
| Network management can be combined under a single management system |
| Previously separate telecoms and datacoms departments can be combined |
| Monthly recurring costs for access lines and WAN services can be decreased through the consolidation of access lines and resulting economies of scale |
| A single, internal wiring infrastructure can be used for both voice and data |
One solution in particular - Voice over IP (VoIP) - is promising to drastically reduce the cost of telephone calls. But setting up a VoIP system is not straightforward. Like any new technology, VoIP requires specialist advice and implementation to ensure its success.
Equally, VoIP is not the universal panacea some organisations will have you believe and knowing when best to utilise it or alternative technologies is key to our service. We will help you through this process and ensure that your VoIP solution will reduce your costs and give your employees greater communication freedom - enabling them to carry out their jobs more efficiently.
Lanway has evolved with the IT revolution. This understanding coupled with our knowledge of voice and data solutions enables us to offer convergence solutions that will provide your organisation with the best possible data and communications infrastructure to support you for many years.
Desktop & mobile access devices
Over the last decade information technology has driven major changes in the way that companies operate. This has been particularly marked in the area of mobile computing solutions. These have enabled organisations to benefit from cost savings and productivity gains in ways that would have been previously unthinkable.
By allowing employees to be in the best place to carry out their job roles, while still having access to critical applications and data stored centrally, mobile computing solutions have allowed for increased customer service levels and distinct competitive advantage.
Lanway offer a comprehensive portfolio of laptop computers, PDAs, Smartphone and Blackberry devices that bring the benefits of mobile computing to your users. Coupled with this, our knowledge of the underlying infrastructure that is required to power these solutions is unsurpassed.
As a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner we are experienced in the Exchange and Windows Mobile applications that deliver true mobility solutions to your employees.
Structured cabling
Cabling is typically a small percentage of the overall IT budget but plays a critical part in the performance of the system. Under investment can lead to poor IT performance.
IP Convergence, streaming video and other multi-media applications is driving the need for a single high quality cabling solution capable of supporting current and future applications
Lanway are specialists in providing structured cabling network solutions to meet the needs of any organisation. Our highly experienced and dedicated team offer a complete service from design through to documentation, including:
| Requirements analysis & system specification |
| Systems analysis and design |
| Cat 5E, Cat 6 & Cat 7 structured cable |
| Access control |
| CCTV |
| AV installations |
| Integrated voice and data cabling |
| Fibre optic cabling installation & termination |
| Moves and changes to existing installations |
Lanway cabling solutions ensure that your network is built on a strong infrastructure and provide:
| Future proof investment - Through our partners we can test, certify and provide a 25 year network performance guarantee. |
| Independent advice and solutions - We are able to provide the best and most cost-effective solution to meet your needs, from a choice of products provided by our partners. |
| High quality service - Our engineers are trained and accredited to install all aspects of your network infrastructure |
IT Security
Protecting your valuable IT resources has never been so important. With the number of potential threats growing by the day, this task can consume considerable time and money if not managed properly.
Lanway are able to offer a comprehensive portfolio of solutions designed to protect your IT resources from many threats. These include:
| Anti-Virus - a comprehensive range of anti-virus products that will protect against known and emerging virus infections. From products for small systems, through to sophisticated solutions to protect enterprise networks, our solutions will protect all sizes of organisation. These solutions will protect your laptops, desktops and servers against virus infection as well as automatically removing viruses when they are detected |
| Spyware & Malware - enterprise-wide solutions that prevent, detect and remove Spyware and other Malware from your network |
| Anti-Spam - a complete range of anti-Spam solutions for all sizes of organisation |
| Web Content Filtering - real-time protection from the latest inappropriate content, viruses, Adware, Spyware and Malware |
| Auditing - software and hardware licensing & audit |
Organisations spend a significant part of their IT budget on hardware, software and other IT resources. In today's business climate they need to know that they are getting a significant return on this investment and that the resources can be used to their maximum capability.
As needs change, IT environments become more complex. Organisations are continually adding new operating systems and applications. The diverse environment that these additions create is increasing costs and demands on IT staff, who already have limited resources.
Lanway provide a software and hardware usage and license reconciliation that delivers a complete and accurate view of software and hardware installations and license compliance.
It delivers:
| A license view of your software inventory - reconcile the applications that are pertinent to your organisation with your software purchase data |
| Software-purchase data - your organisation may be at risk due to illegal usage of software. The key to mitigating the risks associated with an audit, and avoiding the related costs, is to show due diligence through an ongoing compliance program |
| Reduced software and support costs - your organisation may be buying more software licenses and maintenance coverage than it really needs. With reports that illustrate installation, usage and purchases, you will quickly find ways to save |
| Preparation for vendor negotiations - You will be able to secure the best deals if you enter negotiations armed with reports that show exactly how many licenses you really need |
| Hardware inventory - from your network, Intranet, USB flash drive or disc |
| Centralised services - thin client & data centralisation |
The modern enterprise is faced with a number of interrelated problems with regard to providing its employees with access to data and applications:
| Giving users an access experience that's always the same - secure, easy and instant |
| Providing secure remote access to any resource, for any user, anywhere. This means everything from centralised applications to network resources, Web applications, e-mail and even IP telephony |
| Shielding users from the complexity of connecting |
| Keeping mobile, roaming and wireless users connected |
| Making life easier for users by reducing the need to sign on to multiple applications and resources |
A thin client solution can solve all these problems and provide easy and fast management of your IT infrastructure from one console. It provides an always-on connection to information - whether data, voice or people and consolidates access into a central location for more efficient management and effective control.
In addition, it provides a robust and resilient foundation that scales and adapts to support business change and growth.
Server consolidation
If all your fileservers are currently utilised at around the 25% mark then, notwithstanding future growth, it is probably a good idea to consider consolidating your applications and data onto fewer machines.
This consolidation can be carried out in 3 ways: physical, logical and workload:
| Physical consolidation - With physical or geographical consolidation you have all your servers located in one or a few locations enabling the use of clustering technology |
| Logical consolidation - By implementing a systems management solution across all your servers you will be able to utilise common administration and set-up processes to save time. This method of consolidation also offers the advantage of providing a clear real-time inventory of all your systems both type and number |
| Workload consolidation - With physical and logical consolidation there is no change in the overall number of servers you are using whereas workload consolidation allows you to replace a number of small servers with fewer, larger ones. Consequently this type of consolidation requires the most planning and analysis of your existing infrastructure and server workloads. |
Knowing which method of consolidation is right for your particular requirements can save your organisation substantial time and money. Lanway have many years experience in server consolidation planning and implementation. Our service involves analysing your server environment and producing a detailed implementation plan before any work is actually carried out.
SAN & NAS
The increasing amount of data that organisations need to store and access has been growing exponentially over the last few years. If you are:
| Frequently running out of disk space |
| Receiving regular complaints because your servers are not operating at peak performance |
| Experiencing regular outages because of storage-related issues |
| Having frequent problems with your backups |
Then you need to consider a Storage Area Network (SAN). A SAN is a dedicated network that is separate from other LANs and WANs that may already be implemented in your organisation. It generally serves to interconnect the storage-related resources that are connected to one or more servers.
It is very important to select your SAN solution with care and consideration. Many of the standards that are involved with SANs are concerned with interoperability. Some of these standards are still evolving and haven't been equally adopted by all manufacturers of equipment used in SANs. This can lead to difficulties when matching up devices from different vendors and suppliers.
Lanway can help you through all stages of the design, implementation and support process for your SAN or NAS.
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