Cisco Smart Care

CCT ‘s Smart Care Service for Cisco networks

As a certified Cisco partner, CCT is collaborating with Cisco to provide our clients with 24 x 7 remote network monitoring and proactive maintenance services – ongoing verification that your Cisco network is secure, reliable and continues to function optimally.

The Cisco Smart Care Service is available to end users from only a handful of qualified Cisco partners. CCT sits on the Cisco steering committee for this assurance service. Cisco presents CCT as a case study for how other Cisco partners should adopt this value-adding service.

Would you benefit from CCT’s Cisco Smart Care Service?

Like most businesses, the productivity and profitability of your company would suffer if you experienced a network outage.

While device-by-device support services provide excellent protection for individual network components, they cannot guarantee insights into the overall health and security of the network as a whole – or help you to identify potential problems before they arise.

CCT’s Smart Care Service addresses this. But how could it help you?

• How much insight do you have into the health, security and performance of every Cisco device in your network?
• Are you able to view the current network health and status?
• Would you like the peace of mind to be able to identify and correct potential network problems before they can affect your business?
• Would a customised alert service be of value to you?Do your IT staff have the expertise and time to monitor, identify and correct potential network problems before they can affect your business?
• Wouldn’t you prefer this to be automated?
• How do you identify when a device needs to be re-configured, and what the proper fix is?
• Would your IT staff benefit from having access to best-in-class network security and health check tools and expert Cisco networking assistance? Or do they already have time to keep up with the latest networking technologies and developments to ensure optimal performance of your network?
• Do you have a full network audit of Cisco devices in your network, including software and hardware revisions, CPU and memory utilisation, and whether those devices are still supported?

Download the adjacent brochure for further information, or use the “Need our help” form on the right!

Further Reading

Cisco Smart Care - A Case Study

As one of the busiest contact centres in the Europe, and part of a larger multi-national Group company, CCT’s client relies entirely on its communications infrastructure to run its business, which includes the most frequently dialled number in the UK.

Our client has recently implemented CCT’s Cisco Smart Care service providing ‘peace of mind’ support for their Cisco infrastructure across the UK, Ireland, France, Italy, Switzerland and Albania.

Given the scale of their business and the fact that their network is ‘business critical’, CCT’s client has a significant in-house Cisco capability. They were looking for a flexible service contract that provided comprehensive but cost effective proactive monitoring and reporting, and access to Cisco technical expertise when they needed it.

At the core of CCT’s service is the Cisco Smart Care Network Appliance. It is attached to our client’s network to collect data about all of the devices in the network and securely communicates that information to Cisco. Cisco analyses the data and makes threshold comparisons in their “Intellectual Based Rules Engine” that determines whether the device and network performance is as expected. That information is provided back to CCT via a portal that allows us to populate a dashboard to highlight relevant alarms and health-related notifications.

Features/Benefits

• Managing the Cisco inventory for a large, pan-European network infrastructure was time consuming. Using Smart Care services, CCT is able to schedule regular device discovery audits that automatically record device details such as serial numbers and product ID’s.
• It will report on changes or additions to the network since the previous audit. Now, our client can make more informed decisions based on an accurate network audit.
• Using this information, CCT is able to confirm support status of every installed device and provided and action relevant field change notices.
• With an accurate view of the Cisco network, device by device, we ensure that the service contract matches the actual network being managed. There can often be a mis-alignment between what’s in the contract and what’s actually in the network which can leave parts of the network exposed if faults do occur. Now, any device additions are automatically pro-rated into the main Cisco Smart Care agreement.
• CCT has been able to offer all of the previously available proactive management tools at a lower cost. In addition, Cisco Smart Care provides a ‘Disaster Recovery’ service that automates device back-ups by storing the configuration of each device. In the event of a device failure, restoration time is improved as the configuration files are immediately available.
• Understanding the latest and most important core and security updates specific to each device is time consuming. Smart Care highlights core and secure risks based on the following categories: Critical, Severe, Major and Minor. Assessments can be scheduled to run as frequently as required and for each category of risk, Cisco Smart Care provides a recommendation (best practise design/configuration, or software update) on a device by device basis.
• Previously, when a problem occurs in the network, investigations need to start from scratch, meaning the lifecycle of fault finding takes too long. CCT’s Smart Care service now provides an insight into overall network health, delivered via a client portal. The portal can be accessed from any internet connection, or using an iPhone with internet connectivity. Smart Care logs all network details to provide a historical view of network events and any errors that have arisen. When a service affecting issue arises, CCT is able to determine exactly what has happened enabling us to isolate and fix the fault quickly.
• Prior to CCT’s Cisco Smart Care service, our client felt they were over paying for a Cisco managed service. They already had extensive in-house skills and felt that wasn’t reflected in the price of their contract. They have been able to reduce the cost of Cisco support while enhancing rather than sacrificing the quality of service!