HyperCare: Discussing The Business-Case For TRUE IT Support
NEW TIMES, NEW RULES
The world is fast and constantly changing, the market dictates its terms and you can no longer be just a “product company.” If you want to be competitive, you have to be a service company as well. Today the ‘I came-I did-I went away’ style is not enough. This is the time of doing more. This is the time of what we call “Hypercare”.
SO…WHAT IS HYPERCARE?
It’s a dedicated unit that actually was built with one main goal – to focus on constant monitoring, and continuous improvement of a company’s IT environment. Frankly said, we were forced by our clients to do it! When we were taking clients to the cloud, when we were building piece-of-the-art projects using new technologies, sometimes the in-house IT team of our customers were not really familiar with these new technologies, and they needed time to get up to speed. But business never stops and downtimes mean losses. So, while their IT department was still studying and catching up, they needed to be sure that business kept running. Companies started to ask us if we can provide support. We agreed. And whenever customer’s technology team had any issues, they contacted us. Then we decided to go further and do more. We started to monitor their environment, collect logs to be always aware of what’s going on, and deal with arising issues promptly as they happen. Maintenance of the IT environment is really important. It’s like a car; if you don’t do maintenance, it’s just a matter of time when you’ll find yourself stopped in the middle of the highway! For a large enterprise company, this is even more serious…
NOT TO FIX, BUT TO PREVENT
System maintenance and timely updates are great benefits of this approach. This measures aimed to prevent any issues that may affect a business process. We don’t need to reach very far for an example: Recently, Microsoft Exchange released updates, and unfortunately it raised a number of serious, time-sensitive security concerns. Fortunately, nothing wrong happened to our ‘Hypercare-clients’, because we were maintaining, updating and constantly monitoring their environments. Any unusual behaviour in the system is detected, and we get immediate notifications on which we can act.
If the product update wasn’t designed properly from the security point-of-view, hackers can easily find a backdoor. If we are talking about such giants as Microsoft, they are really active on those things, and they fix them quickly. If your Microsoft Exchange Server was up to date with the latest updates, then you had nothing to worry about. But the question was whether or not your IT department was really maintaining it, really monitoring what security fixes are missing on the server, on how many servers, and many other critical questions. It’s not easy. Hypercare is actually designed to do this. It’s about not being reactive, but being proactive.
CONSEQUENCES
Consequences of not maintaining your systems can be terrible. As an example let’s take Garmin. In May 2020, Garmin was hacked and hackers demanded $10 million for the keys to liberate Garmin’s systems. The company couldn’t work[1] for an extended period of time and paid a ransom[2] to prevent customer data from leaking after the attack. This hack was possible because Garmin didn’t maintain their systems as actively as they should have. In other words, this cyber attack was – arguably – quite preventable!
Nevertheless, we know many companies that are not maintaining their IT environments for some reason. Some believe that updates “just harm the system;” It’s not a joke! 20 years ago, it was really popular to say that updates bring more issues than fixes, and there was a huge community of experts that didn’t want to install updates. Although time proved that maintenance is necessary and such thoughts are ridiculous remnants, still some people follow this methodology. Others just don’t have time, or don’t have an IT department, or this department is tiny and over-prioritized already. So they use what they have, “as long as it works.”
On the other hand, when you maintain and consistently monitor systems, your business should be resilient to downtime. A properly maintained IT environment statistically, factually means less or no downtime, less or no cyber security attacks, and less or no chance of paying ransoms to illusive hackers.
One of DeepDive’s first and most trusted clients is Patient Transport Services in Manitoba, the number 1 private ambulance provider in the province of Manitoba, in Canada. Right from the beginning, they strategically decided they needed new technologies to grow, so they contacted us. In a time-sensitive, life-saving environment, with communication issues with other care-givers, where every second and every message mattered…we stepped in. We had to build their business from scratch from the technology perspective. We did migrations, built an entirely new infrastructure, and solved their communication issues. We still work with them to this day, and maintain their environments actively. Since 2014 their business has never been down. Zero downtime. Nothing.
In 2014, Patient Transport Services CEO, Lolo Eckert, said she wanted to make Stretcher Services the largest ambulance provider in the province. Now they are.
TEAMWORK
Back in the days, when a company wanted to implement new technology, it hired a dedicated professional, who had the abilities to handle the entire job him or her-self. Today, enterprises often work with many different infrastructures simultaneously, using the best from all of them. Today’s modern enterprise might operate simultaneously on AWS Amazon infrastructure, Oracle infrastructure, Citrix infrastructure, Microsoft Cloud, etc. And when the modern enterprise wants to bring something new into the business, they must consider all those systems.
The problem is that there is no person alive today who would know all of these IT ecosystems and technologies perfectly. It’s too much. It’s too vast. Even if you manage to find such experts, it will be incredibly expensive to hire them.
The ‘Hypercare’ approach suggests having all experts constantly monitoring your ecosystems, always ready once they are needed, all for a practical price. As initiated through the SaaS (Software as a Service) business model, the overall cost for such a dispersed team of experts is much less than the cost of one super-human full-time professional. But let’s set aside financial benefits. Hypercare delivers clients a headache-free infrastructure with monitoring, alerting, protection and updates. The full framework where enterprise managers do not need to develop or buy anything else themselves. In other words, it’s headache-free!
Hypercare is a valued service for new clients, and it’s even more synergistic for existing customer relationships. If we built the IT infrastructure for our client, then onboarding them to our Hypercare support platform is almost seamless. If it’s a new client and a new relationship, it begins by studying as it always should, followed by adjustments & fixes, getting the IT infrastructure to the point where it works seamlessly and is ready for an active, secure, monitoring service.
GIVING MORE
One important thing that we did not mention is that Hypercare is not just technical support AFTER the project is finished. Hypercare is considering your clients as partners, and taking care of their business from the very start. When DeepDive starts a new project, we start from the ‘Discovery’ stage. It helps us to know all the processes and systems, thus understanding where the real best value lies. We do not just create a solution that a client wants; we find out how to deliver this solution in the best way, we use the best product that fits this particular client, and we take the best tools from different products if needed. Performing enterprise IT security checks is an absolute must. After we made sure everything’s working on the highest level, we keep maintaining it on this level, providing support and timely updates. Hypercare is about bringing value. It’s a synergistic approach combining all services DeepDive Group provides.
Whether your organization calls it “Hypercare,” or something entirely different, it’s the value that matters! Find YOUR Hypercare.
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REFERENCES
This article was inspired in conversation with Misha Hanin, Founder & CEO at DeepDive Group
- Garmin outage caused by confirmed WastedLocker ransomware attack https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/garmin-outage-caused-by-confirmed-wastedlocker-ransomware-attack/
- Garmin obtains decryption key after ransomware attack https://news.sky.com/story/garmin-obtains-decryption-key-after-ransomware-attack-12036761
