AUGUST 2017 / ISSUE 4
Quarterly Insider
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Welcome. Hello and welcome to the latest edition of the Quarterly Insider. I would firstly like to welcome all of our new customers and secondly would like to say a big thank you to those that have signed up to our customer satisfaction programme to become ANS ‘Raving Fans’ (you can find out more about how to sign up to be a Raving Fan on page 8 and 9). We’ve had another great quarter having welcomed new customers and team members. Significantly this quarter, we have achieved the Microsoft Gold Cloud Competency Certification and AWS Advanced Partner Status, cementing our position as the UK’s leading Cloud Services Provider. Also this quarter, we partnered with Ecotricity to completely eliminate our carbon footprint generated by the power supply at our Manchester head office, based in Manchester Science Park. To find out more about this story, visit page 14 As ever, thank you for your continued partnership. We look forward to continue working with you in the future.
Paul Shannon, CEO
Helen Thomas Writer Natalie Yates Graphic Designer
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Contents.
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ANS in the Press.
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Are you a Raving Fan?
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Inside the ANS Academy.
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This Quarter’s Hottest Reads.
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An Interview with our Service Delivery Director.
CSR- Committed to Building a Better Future.
Dates for your Diary.
ANS in the Press. ANS Leads Public Cloud Market with AWS Advanced Partner Status. ANS is now an Advanced Consulting Partner, meaning we demonstrate a superior level of expertise and outstanding consultative services in supporting cloud-based solutions on AWS. Our consultative–led approach to customer engagements is complimented by the skills to assess and recommend the most appropriate solution, to achieve the best desired business outcome for customers. The highly exclusive certification positions ANS as one of just a handful of ANS Advanced Consulting Partners in the UK. Read the full press release here: ans.co.uk/ans-leads-public-cloud-market-with-aws-advanced-partner-status/
Pioneering Council Leads the way with Public Cloud. Salford City Council has taken a transformational step on its digital journey by adopting public cloud services with cloud and managed services provider ANS Group. The project has seen ANS implement a flexible and scalable public cloud solution, which will provide the council with faster and more effective performance of its customer-facing digital systems, as well as increased security and disaster recovery capabilities. To find out what Jon Burt, Corporate Infrastructure Architect at Salford City Council said, read the full press release here: ans.co.uk/pioneering-council-leads-the-way-with-public-cloud/
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TrustFord Accelerates its Networks with ANS. TrustFord, the UK’s largest, dedicated Ford dealer group, has partnered with ANS, to transform the performance of its network and IT systems with a Wide Area Network (WAN) solution. The company will enjoy significantly higher bandwidth, faster network speeds and direct public cloud connectivity, allowing it to run more applications with increased efficiency. This will enable them to better engage with customers at its dealerships through technology, transform its internal communications and futureproof its network infrastructure. The project will enable TrustFord to accelerate the introduction of the FordStore concept into dealerships, which creates an immersive, digitally-led experience for customers through interactive displays, a dedicated app and video content. Read the full press release here: ans.co.uk/trustford-accelerates-itsnetworks-with-ans/
ANS Achieve Microsoft Gold Cloud Competency Certification. We have been awarded the highly-regarded Microsoft Gold Cloud Competency Certification which demonstrates our ‘best-in-class’ ability and commitment to helping customers migrate and build their next generation of digital business applications in Microsoft Azure. On securing the coveted Gold platform competency, we have proven our leading position in the market. The Gold Platform competency is only awarded to exceptional partners who successfully complete a series of exams to prove their level of technological expertise. We also submitted customer references that demonstrated successful projects, met performance commitments, and passed technology and sales assessments. Check out the full story here: ans.co.uk/ans-dominate-cloud-market/
Are you a Raving Fan? It is our goal to achieve industry leading PR for ANS and our customers, recognising the innovative solutions we collaboratively provide for organisations and their community of users. We aim to sign up 200 Raving Fans to our customer satisfaction programme, which will only be achieved by maintaining the current exceptional level of service to our customers. This quarter we have welcomed the following Raving Fans...
Become a Raving Fan! At ANS, there is no such thing as the bare minimum. We endeavour to always go above and beyond for our customers, and every project is a chance for us to deliver first-class solutions and welcome customers into our Raving Fan Club. Our Raving Fans know there’s more to a great customer relationship than technical knowledge or timely delivery – those may be the building blocks of our success, but for them it’s about partnering with a company they can trust, a company that they enjoy working with and a company that is just as invested in their success as they are.
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Inside the ANS Academy.
The ANS academy presents an opportunity to kick start an exciting IT career at the cutting edge of technology. We’re combing fast-paced, on-the-job instruction with real work – guaranteeing that our apprentices won’t just be stuck in a classroom all day! We’ve caught up with ANS Academy Manager, Anna O’Brien to see how all of our apprentices are getting on. I’m pleased to say that all of the apprentices we took on last July have now completed all of their coursework and are settling into their placements full time. For a number of weeks the apprentices have been job shadowing, but they’re now putting their knowledge into practice with the support of their allocated mentors. The next step for the apprentices will be ensuring they are fully integrated into working within the service desk independently, meaning they’ll be on the road to passing the first year of their apprenticeship. They will then begin working towards their level 4 qualification in August. With a new set of apprentices starting in September, we’ve changed the way we’re delivering the course, meaning the new recruits will gain even more hands-on experience. To find out more about apprenticeships at ANS, please visit: ans.co.uk/careers/
// Anna O’Brien, ANS Academy Manager
This Quarter’s Hottest Reads. What is a Cloud-ready Network and why is it Crucial to your Cloud Strategy? ANS CTO Andy Barrow took to LinkedIn to explore the Cloud-ready network, following our highly successful ‘Architecting a Cloud-ready Network’ seminar in Manchester and London. In the blog, Andy explains that as someone who spends a large majority of time speaking to customers, he’s found that while organisations are focusing on migrating their applications, they’re often neglecting the network. Andy goes on to define a cloud-ready network and reveals why it is crucial in enabling organisations to embrace digital transformation. Find out what Andy had to say here: blog.ans.co.uk/ blog/what-is-a-cloud-ready-network-and-why-is-itcrucial-to-your-cloud-strategy
Feel Right at Home with ANS’ Hosting Services. As the adoption of Public Cloud Hyperscalers increases, organisations are finding that there are certain barriers to entry that they can’t always overcome and the two of the most common are, requirements of the application and compliance. In this blog, ANS’ Head of Infrastructure Services, Jamie Sinclair takes a look at the reasons why these barriers exist and present an option for organisations that want to host applications off site, need a flexible or OpEx financial model and are looking for a Public Cloud ‘feel’ on dedicated hardware. Check out the blog here: blog.ans.co.uk/blog/feel-right-at-home-with-ans-hosting-services
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How is Public Cloud transforming the Enterprise? At one of our recent roundtable events, we invited senior IT leaders of enterprise organisations to share some discussions and debates around Public Cloud and the benefits it can bring to organisations in the commercial sector. In this blog, ANS’ Enterprise Sales Director Robin Lee comments on the topics raised and shares his viewpoint around which Hyperscale platforms are best suited to specific organisational requirements. To find out more, read the full blog here: blog.ans.co.uk/blog/how-is-public-cloud-transforming-the-enterprise
The Only Way is up: ANS’ Mission to the Cloud The IT landscape has evolved significantly over the last few years. Not that long ago, on-premise was the primary choice for most enterprise software, but we’re now seeing a fundamental shift in the need to provide scalability, speed and flexibility to ever-increasing consumers through Cloud technology. In Paul Sweeney’s latest blog, he explains how the increase in cloud adoption is creating a huge impact on the strategic direction of ANS. Check out the full blog here: resources.ans.co.uk/blog/the-only-way-is-up-ans-mission-to-the-cloud
An Interview with our Service Delivery Director. Recently, ANS’ Service Delivery Director, Chris Hodgson sat down with Logic Monitor to discuss how LM Config is enabling ANS to monitor your critical IT infrastructure in real time, reducing the mean time to resolution which is becoming a major value add. You can listen to the full podcast interview here. Alternatively, check out the highlights below! As the Service Delivery Director at ANS, I have witnessed the company progress and develop our award-winning Managed Service offerings over the years and with our investment in Logic Monitor Config, I am confident that we are better placed than ever before to support our customer’s business-critical infrastructure around the clock. So what type of devices in particular do you focus your configuration monitoring on? ANS is a major Cisco partner, so around 70% of all the infrastructure we manage is Cisco technology. We use UCS as our main server offering and all of our network devices are pretty much Cisco. So in terms of what we actually monitor, it ranges from technology such as switches, ASAs, ASRs and even Nexus. Who at ANS is using the platform on a daily basis? Is it across all of your teams, or is there a dedicated config monitoring and managing team? It’s mainly used by the Service Desk, so our Level 2 and Level 3 Technical Analysts will be using it as part of our incident management process. If one of our customers experiences hardware failure for instance, our priority is to keep the mean time to resolution to an absolute minimum.
“If one of our customers experiences hardware failure for instance, our priority is to keep the mean time to resolution to an absolute minimum.”
How frequently do you see configuration changes as a root cause of performance impacting events? To be honest, quite a lot! Our Managed Service offerings are separated into two main categories, the first one being Enhanced, where we’re supplementing the customer and the
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other being a Manged offering. If the customer is on a Managed contract, configuration changes are completely out of their control so in that case, config is very rarely the cause of an issue because of our strict and rigorous change control process that we have in place. Issues caused by config changes are therefore more likely to be experienced by our Enhanced contract customers as their change request process may not always be as robust as ours.
We find it incredibly useful to be able to access a snapshot of where the customer was yesterday. From a problem determination perspective, we can quite easily flip back or at least be able to see what has changed because we know exactly how the world was yesterday, or this morning when it was still
working. In this scenario, it makes it easy to rule in or rule out issues when you’ve got it in front of you in black and white. How does it help or change the way you do things that is built in to the rest of your monitoring platform? We use Logic Monitor as a problem determination tool. Logic Monitor is the first tool we turn to when our customers experience an issue. We will log in to identify the problem and ask some key questions such as are we seeing IPCU? Are we seeing high bandwidth? Are we seeing a storage issues? It’s crucial that we are able to quickly find answers to all of these questions in a single platform. This may seem like a small thing, but it really helps us to reduce the mean time to resolution even further which could be absolutely critical for our customers.
new kit we had to recode and rebuild. Logic Monitor is a great solution to this issues. Our techies are already trained on the platform and are using in day-in-day-out and as it’s a SAAS based platform you guys do all the work for us so all we have to do is use it! We’re proud to be an early adopter and we were in fact involved in some of the development so it’s great to see that part of the product progress and grow. It has also allowed our teams to focus on what they’re good at which is looking after our customers.
“Logic Monitor is the first tool we turn to when our customers experience an issue”
How does LM config compare to what you were using before? Before Logic Monitor we used to use Nagios. We created our own config technology which we bolted into this programme. But the difference was that every time Cisco or NetApp released
Managed Services.
If you want to shape the future and increase efficiency and flexibility through user productivity, then click here to find out more about our award-winning
Alternatively, to take a sneak peek inside our secure operations centre where we monitor our customer’s critical infrastructure 24x7x365 click here.
CSR - Committed to Building a Better Future.
ANS Goes Green! In July, we partnered with Ecotricity to completely eliminate our carbon footprint generated by the power supply at our Manchester head office, based in Manchester Science Park. Ecotricity has been described by clean energy regulators as the ‘greenest energy provider in the UK’. Their unique operating model sees them using customer’s energy bills to fund the building of new sources of Green Energy. We’ve been committed to reducing our carbon footprint for over a decade. We have many green initiatives in place including a successful cycle to work scheme, but switching to green energy is by far the biggest single thing we believe a business can do to fight climate change. We want to be a part of the movement where ethical business is regarded as the norm and as Manchester’s
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leading Cloud Services Provider, we want to be known for leading the way and setting a good example for other local businesses. By switching to a green energy provider, we are supporting Manchester City Council’s pledge to reduce CO2 levels by 41% by 2020, from 2005 levels – a target set in 2009 as Manchester’s fair contribution to government’s target to reduce UK emissions by 80% by 2050. To find out how your business you can switch to green energy and reduce your carbon footprint, please visit: ecotricity.co.uk/ for-your-business. // Catherine Astles, CSR Team Leader
Dates for your Diary. Make a note of our upcoming events below. We hope to see you there!
// Bristol Marriott Hotel City Centre
Sep
ANS will be exhibiting at UCISA’s September Conference, ‘Agile or Fragile: How flexible is your infrastructure?’ Join us to find out how we have helped HE clients to ensure they are able to meet their rapidly changing requirements to keep up with student expectation.
Sep
28th/29th UCISA IG17 Conference
13th- Cycle to Work Day // UK wide Join ANS as we ditch the car for the day and saddle up. By taking part in cycle to work day, you’ll boost your health and fitness, improve your wellbeing and show some love for the environment.
// Excel London As Gold Sponsors of this two day event, ANS will be presenting and exhibiting, so be sure to pop over to our stand to find out how you can reduce risk and achieve continuous efficiency in the cloud, as well as discovering how you can be more successful with Azure.
Oct
31st- Microsoft Future Decoded
Synergy House / Guildhall Close Manchester Science Park Manchester / M15 6SY
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T: 0161 227 1002 F: 0161 227 1020
18 King William Street London EC4N 7BP
T: 0207 167 6666 F: 0161 227 1020