Hosted Virtual Machines

Microsoft Service Provider Licensing Agreements (SPLA)

Panoptics can provide SPLA licenses to customers which enables them to effectively rent the required licenses on a monthly basis therefore only pay for the licenses required. If for instance a test environment is required for a month, the customer can enjoy the benefit of only renting the required additional licenses for that month. Or if the number of users that can access the systems goes up one month and then reduces the following, the bill will rise and fall with metered usage.

Panoptics also recognise that many clients have already made significant investments in Microsoft licenses and where possible these licenses can be reused within Panoptics Cloud infrastructure. In order to achieve this the client must have mobility rights with their license, which typically requires Software Assurance to be purchased with the licenses. In addition, if the licenses do not have cloud mobility rights, we can offer a hybrid cloud so that they can be used on co-located equipment to ensure they are not wasted. With any client engagement an analysis of the current license state will be included to ensure that the best commercial position is reached.

Finally any Virtual machines purchased by the client will come with any variant of Windows 2003, 2008 or 2012 as standard so no additional Server Operating System licenses will be required.

Change Management 

The Change Management service is based on ITIL best practice and has the primary objective of protecting the client production services from outage and disruption resulting from change.  The supplier Change Management team acts as the primary interface for the client Change Management team (if it exists or alternatively the nominated authority) to control changes to IT Infrastructure.

The process is applied and governed to ensure that changes are recorded, evaluated, prioritised, planned, tested, authorised, implemented, documented and reviewed in a controlled manner with minimal or no disruption to the service.

The service is delivered during normal working hours and is subject to the process described and signed off by the customer in the Operating Service Guide (OSG). The service applies standardised methodology and robust processes based on ITIL best practice to ensure efficient and prompt handling of infrastructure changes, thereby minimising any potential service impact to the business.  Goals and objectives are as follows:-

• To minimize the impact of change upon service quality, thus improving the day-to-day operation of the organization.
• To respond to the customer’s changing business requirements whilst maximizing value and reducing incidents, disruption and re-work.
• To respond to the business and IT requests for change that will integrate services with the business needs.
• To ensure that changes are recorded and evaluated, and that authorisation, prioritisation, planning, testing, and implementation are conducted in a controlled manner.
• To manage the following aspects of the process:  Assess and evaluate the change, change authorisation, communications, co-ordination of change implementation, closure and post-implementation review / lessons learnt
• The Supplier will deliver a portal enabling remote workflow and tracking of all changes.
• Any projects from 3^rd parties on the managed environment need to adhere to Panoptics Change Process to ensure the SLAs can be met.

Systems Management – Standard

All DC, WAN, hardware & networking will be managed as part of the Private Cloud infrastructure but Operating Systems and Common off the Shelf (CoTS) applications will not be managed as standard.  This service in conjunction with the monitoring, availability and Capacity Management service will ensure that the platform is kept up to date and remains stable. We deliver a quarterly patching schedule for everything up to the ESX hypervisor to ensure that the availability SLA we provide is met. For Operating System and Application management please see the optional Systems Management service.

Exit Management & Contract Novation

Panoptics understand the critical nature of the services provided to customers and so will provide the necessary contractual Novation and Exit processes as standard. This is to ensure that clients have the comfort of knowing that whenever they choose to change supplier or if in the unlikely event of Panoptics experiencing a Business Failure, the services will continue to operate in the DC and /or their systems and data is portable enough to enable an easy migration out of the environment.

In the case of Exit, the data will be exported to media (tapes, HDDs, SANs etc.) provided by the customer within 20 working days of the relevant notice being received in a pre-agreed format.

Active Directory & User Authentication 

Panoptics can audit and assess the existing AD and either extend that into our environment if suitable or replace it with an environment that will provide easy remote access for all staff and provide a suitable platform enabling rapid scaling and full auditability ensuring that only the right people have access to the relevant services.