Engineer Assist Services

inCloudOne® provides support process that is very flexible and can be tailored to suit, your availability of on-site IT staff, change patterns and budgetary requirements.   

• Installations
• Monitoring*
• Pro-Active Support
• Reactive Support
• Planned Works - Moves, Adds, Deletes, Changes (MADC)
  *Typically we ask customers to provide VPN access to a inCloudOne management VLAN if you wish us to monitor and manage and configure on-site supplied equipment.

Service-based SLAs

As with all IT solutions there are many components involved and sometime many providers. inCloudOne will package these components and managed all providers giving you and your business an single end to end solution and SLA wrapper which break down as follows:

Core Services

The "Availability" and "Uptime" of the Cloud Services that inCloudOne provide to our customers

Connectivity Circuits

The connection to our customers site(s) and the "Availability" of this service as an average per month

Hardware

The "Response Time" it will take inCloudOne to respond to a hardware fault being detected or reported to us and the "Replacement Time" it will take for us to swop out the hardware if it has failed.

Support

The "Response Time" inCloudOne offers to all of our customers who use our support services.

Build

inCloudOne® aims to solve our customers business needs with our Managed Cloud Services (MCS), by discussing your requirements with our sales or technical pre-sales advisors we can build you a bundled solution to solve your immediate needs and then flexed this solution as your business needs change.

Buying Pre-Paid Vouchers

If our customers purchase any on-site equipment from inCloudOne they will automatically be granted the right to change the configuration of the devices to meet specific on-site needs e.g. routing of new subnets to a WAN VPN. inCloudOne accept that this is the most cost effect solution for the customer as this allow customer to make the changes when they require and it saves them money compared with a provider locked device.
However, by changing configuration their is always a risk of causing an outage to critical services and the customer may require assistance from inCloudOne to get them back up and running or simply wish us to make the changes for them.

• To cover these situations or any other IT related support issues, inCloudOne provide a Engineer Assist Service which is very flexible and very cost effective.
• By buying Support Vouchers in advance you get support time banked with inCloudOne® so it is ready and available when ever you need it.
• You only need to purchase a minimum of two vouchers and you can always top them up if you find you need more IT support during a change programme.
• You only pay for the support you receive.
• We think this is a very fair and responsible way of providing support services to our customers and it offers huge flexibility and extended IT services.

How you spend the Vouchers

Once vouchers have been purchased, then these can be spent on support as required by our customers.

The following rates show how these vouchers are spend:

SMC Support - Email, Telephone and includes On-Site support*

• 1 Voucher = 30 Minutes - Core Business Hours 9am - 5pm
• 1 Voucher = 20 Minutes - Outside of Core Business Hours (excludes Bank Holidays)
• 1 Voucher = 15 Minutes - Bank Holidays

*Onsite engineers are only supplied in half and full days (4 and 8 hours respectively) and their time includes travel

Fully Managed Support (Closed Solutions only) with SLAs - Monthly subscription applies

This is a traditional fully managed support agreement and has been designed to provide the customer with an SLA cover and technical support should on-site services stop working. This options covers the following SLA terms:

• 24x7 Monitoring
• 24x7 with a 4 hour SLA response time
• Automatic and pro-active response to monitored outages
• All supplied inCloudOne hardware equipment only
• Outside of BAU hours for Planned Changes
• A monthly recurring charge applies
• Pre-paid vouchers for all customer change requests

Standard Support (Open or Closed Solutions) with limited SLAs - Pre-Paid Vouchers

This option is a pay-as-you-go support agreement that has been primarily design to support changes to on-site IT services and covers the following terms:

• 8x5 with 4 hour SLA response time
• 8x5 BAU Planned Changes
• Covers all general IT support for services provided
• Payment is via Pre-paid voucher scheme

Call Out Engineer - Day rate 

This option has been designed to provide customers with remote and on-site IT skills and capability should they ever need it in an emergency. No monthly rental or voucher scheme is required. Usual response time is 4 hours and is only available inside business hours.

• inCloudOne recognise that not all customers may want us to be able to access and monitor their on-site equipment. Although this does restrict use from monitoring the end to end solution inCloudOne can still assist with on-site support using the FREE suppled 3G wireless stick.
• By using a laptop connected to our connectivity solutions with the 3G stick inserted we can access your equipment via a controlled WebEx session so you can see exactly what we are doing to address the issues and even show us what changes you have made.

Installations

inCloudOne® Installations - When ever possible we try to ship any equipment that can simply be unpacked and installed without any IT skills. On more complex deployments our customer may require an engineer to assist with the installations as sometimes there may be a degree of integration with their existing IT systems on-site.

inCloudOne® will build your IT solution in our cloud and provide instructions on how to use it.

If anything equipment needs to be installed at site then in most casses we will ship it as self-install solution as most equipment simply requires unpacking and plugging in. For equipment that requires configuration on-site then we sell the equipment with Engineer Assist which means some one with the correct skills will turn up at your site with the equipment, configure it and get you the customer to sign-off the installation when the work has been successfullly completed and the service is up and running.

inCloudOne® do allow customers to use their own equipment as part of our solution but we may not always be able to monitor it and we can not offer SLA's.

Planned Works (MADC)

inCloudOne® MADC - All planned works, Moves, Adds, Deletes and Changes will be undertaken by our engineers in accordance with our customer requirements allowing services to be flexed to suite changing business needs.

Open or Closed Solutions

All customers must have pre-paid vouchers for any change work that is undertaken:

• inCloudOne® Open Services - allows our customers to have access to the routers and hardware equipment we sell or include as part of our service as we recognise that this is essential for smaller organisations to be in control of their changes and we have found that larger organisations also benefit from this as it keeps the support costs down for the overall service. It is the responsibility of the end customer to keep copies of their latest configuration.
  Any changes required to an Open Service can be through planned works or reactive-respond triggered by an outage, email request or a phone call within core business hours.  All time spend on incident and changes will be drawn down from the pre-paid vouchers. The minimum vouchers that must be in place at all time is 2.
• inCloudOne® Closed Services - Traditional fully managed and closed solutions means that all changes on the environment follow a strict change control process by inCloudOne engineers only. By closing the systems from third parties generally means that availability of the service can be better controlled, changes are not done within core business hours and stability of the end to end service is maintained.  Any changes to Closed Solutions must be planned and scheduled in a change window suitable for the end customer. A full impact assessments be done for each change and a roll back plan agreed before any change is undertaken. If a monthly subscription service has been taken then changes can be done outside of core business hours. All time spend on a change will be drawn down from the pre-paid vouchers. The minimum vouchers that must be in place at all time is 2.

Monitoring

• inCloudOne® Monitoring - Our engineers are based in our Service Management Centre and are responsible for monitoring and fixing any issues that may arise on our core services.
• Whilst are engineers will as standard pro-actively address any core service issues, they are also there to support all of our customers on-site issues either pro-actively and reactively through our Monthly Subscription or Support Voucher scheme that we operate.

Incidents

• inCloudOne® Open Solutions - Incidents will only be supported by the Support Voucher Scheme and are subject to access right to on-site equipment and may require client side support to resolve.  Should an incident occur that is not the fault of the end customer then inCloudOne will not charge for this work.
• inCloudOne® Closed Solutions - Are all covered by a Monthly Subscription charge, but are subject to access right to on-site equipment and may require client side support to resolve.

The standard respond is 4 hours within business hours (subject to contract)