eacs Ltd is known as a leading IT Services Provider to the mid market in the United Kingdom. During the pandemic and through a two year surge in business growth, they knew the importance of the transformative journey their business was on. Following successful investment in service delivery, customer service, and business operations, eacs turned their focus to optimizing their Network Operations Center (NOC).
For their complex environment where productivity is critical, complete standardization seemed unrealistic. Backup checking and remediation fell to a small team of service analysts using multiple tools and individual methods, which was inefficient. That’s when they began looking for an end-to-end monitoring solution for their backups.
Once eacs was onboarded, they began by testing two large key clients in Backup Radar. They immediately saw how the application was uncovering inefficiencies and risks in the process and automating the team’s manual efforts. After running this successful test, they quickly scaled up to an 800 server plan within two months. After four months of use, the team removed virtually all manual processes from across their entire client base and are very confident in the output from Backup Radar across their entire portfolio.
After being very intentional with the set up, eacs has been able to expand the scope and remit of the NOC. “It has transformed the way they work and think, they are much happier and are confident in their daily reporting being 100% accurate,” said Anne Stokes, eacs head of services.
“This has flipped the focus of the working day, from 90% of the day doing backup checking and 10% available for remediation activities, to 10% checking and having 90% of the day available for any remediation, repairs, and special projects to the clients’ environment.”
It made a big difference to their team’s capacity when they were finally able to preemptively solve problems, not just fight the same fires each day. For eacs, who has a history of nurturing and developing its talent, this creates more engaging and educational opportunities to bring technicians from apprentices through to consultants.
“The benefits of Backup Radar are not just being seen by eacs, our own customers are seeing the benefits, too. The conversation is now about system improvements, not simply repairs. It’s a good place to be,” said Stokes.
Within 30 minutes of a backup problem being identified, eacs is able to reach out to their end clients, and help them make more informed decisions about their IT infrastructure. With intelligent ticketing right to their PSA and automated email escalation, there is no need to go looking for backup issues manually.
eacs’ NOC team continues to grow and are in Backup Radar everyday, not because they have to, but because it can inform projects of interest. They check backup status on a regular basis to guide remediation. Once complete, they have time to be proactive using trends and insights from the dashboard.
The NOC can run analysis by looking at peaks and troughs in backup failures to see what adjustments can be made to a backup time or platform. If they see a consistent day or time when a failure occurs it could be remedied, removing a need for remediation at all in the future. They also can consider factors that may spread across multiple clients, so one correction could be shared across the entire portfolio, sometimes before an error even happens.
Additionally, leadership of the NOC set up custom alerts, saving time with automated, actionable, high-level information.
“They can step back and see the wood from the trees,” said Stokes. “I am very proud of the work the NOC does and we have a great team. It’s important that they have the right tools to do their jobs and see the impact they have. They can monitor other alerts in the NOC, easily determine immediate concerns, and develop add-ons which could bring additional value to their clients across all managed services.”
As the security and management landscape evolves, eacs has noticed that compliance measures are becoming of utmost importance to their clients. They wanted to automate compliance reporting to ensure there was timely and accurate data for each client’s needs, and Backup Radar provided just that.
Automated reporting from Backup Radar gives clients the trust and reassurance they need in eacs’s tools and systems.
“It conveys confidence to our clients, that was implied before, but now they can see it,” said Stuart Dickinson, managing director. “eacs can quickly and easily report on what is working, what was remediated, and prove how quickly actions were completed.”
“The biggest surprise and highlight has been the collaboration,” said Tom Wicks, Head of NOC at eacs. “Backup Radar is exactly how it sounds – a radar for all things backup related, it can do it all. They helped us put the right reports and alerts in place in their thorough onboarding. They were even able to build a custom script for one of our backup vendors which we were not getting native results from.”
With shared experiences from hundred’s of MSP’s, Backup Radar is able to scale their learnings to ensure best practices are in place for every client.
Backup Radar’s continuous development and innovation is, in part, fuelled by the feedback from its users. The product expands with each request so Backup Radar can support others with similar environments, including new backup vendors.
“It really does work well within our Veeam and Azure environment, while still supporting the other applications we use,” Wicks said.
When asked what they would miss the most in a non-Backup Radar world, eacs mentioned two key benefits. The confidence earned with their customers through compliance reporting, and team efficiency and engagement.
“We could make it work without, but I think we’re much happier having Backup Radar in place,” said Richard Puckey, head of compliance.
