Cloud and Network Solutions
Our Services
Partners International provides clients with fixed-price managed services as well as project consulting and supplemental staffing. PartnerCare, our fixed-price flagship managed services offering, provides clients with helpdesk support and unlimited management, monitoring and maintenance services for workstations, mobile devices, physical and virtual servers, cloud services and IT infrastructure. Our project consulting services range from strategic engagements to project design, implementation and rescues. For clients with internal IT staff, we offer flexible supplemental staffing services to fill roles as varied as helpdesk and engineer up to leadership.
Our Standards
We understand that our most organizations are focused on their mission and in regards to IT, would not necessarily know about a problem until consequences are being felt. How would an executive know if a firewall was configured improperly, making their organization vulnerable to attack? At Partners we believe it is our responsibility to bring and implement IT standards that exceed working vs. non-working – that don’t rely on our clients to prod us to fix problems, but allow us instead to focus on how to improve IT support of the client’s mission.
All of our services are backed-up by a culture of accountability, both internally and to our clients. Our quality control process includes the review of at least 10% of our service requests weekly to ensure staff are following to our standards, policies and procedures. Graphs of adherence to our target response and resolution times are updated every 15 minutes and displayed on large screens throughout our offices. Each staff member receives a quarterly review based on quantitative and qualitative measures that focuses on providing guidance and rewards for improvement, accompanied by a quarterly bonus. We meet monthly with all clients, during which we present summaries of our performance over the past month as well as of our monitoring of the health, security and performance of the client’s IT assets.
Our Tech Expertise
Implementing and managing cloud services has been our focus since 2009, when our leadership determined that the technology maturity and cost-benefit trade-offs made this direction the best investment for most of our clients. Our partnerships with and expertise in Microsoft Office 365 and Azure, Amazon Web Services, Google Apps for Work and RingCentral have ensured that our clients have well-planned and optimally configured migrations and implementations. While we continue to manage on premise virtualized servers for a number of our clients, we closed our data centers in 2010 when we completed the migration of our own IT infrastructure to cloud services.
From clients with a single physical server to those with more than forty virtual servers supporting hundreds of staff, we continue to implement and manage on premise and data center-based server environments. Our core strengths lie in VMware, Microsoft Hyper-V and SAN implementation and management. We have helped many organizations integrate their existing servers and infrastructure with cloud services by utilizing synchronization and virtual private network technologies. Microsoft Exchange, SQL Server, Internet Information Server, SharePoint as well as enterprise accounting and email archiving solutions
We provide 24 x 7 x 365 monitoring all client workstations, servers, mobile devices, Internet connections, cloud services, firewalls, routers, switches, network storage and wide area networks for performance, security, and health. Not only does this alert and allow us to respond immediately to any problems, but we are able to detect and respond to developing problems (i.e. degraded Internet performance, storage that is nearing capacity, hacking attempts) before they have serious consequences.
Our IT helpdesk services are available by phone, email, instant messaging, web chat, or in-person and are always provided by local staff who are tier two or higher. Standard hours are 8 AM to 6 PM EST, but emergency support is accessible 24 x 7 x 365 when needed.
Many of our clients rely on us to ensure that they meet federal and/or state standards (i.e. HIPAA & HITECH) governing the security and privacy of data. Security is a focus at Partners and our standard solutions include transparent data and device encryption, multi-factor authentication, extensive logging and analysis, and leadership on compliance audits