How an International Financial Institution Utilized NorthstarMS for Managed Service Support

Client Profile and Business Drivers

As part of an enterprise-wide initiative to ensure effective management of infrastructure systems, a mid-sized international financial institution with East Coast-based US operations engaged Winslow Technology Group (WTG) for managed service support. The client presented WTG with several challenges that required creative, cost-efficient, and highly- effective solutions. Firstly, the client needed to ensure compliance with regulatory requirements for security and data privacy. These requirements meant that all infrastructure systems, platforms, and operating systems be properly patched and upgraded in a timely fashion. Additionally, ongoing maintenance of security, change, and risk management for technology infrastructure was required to achieve compliance. As a secondary set of requirements, the client needed to adhere to contracted SLAs to minimize downtime attributed to infrastructure outages. Modernization to ensure uptime, performance, and mitigate business disruption risks was an extension of the SLA requirements.

Client Objectives

The client had a defined set of objectives that WTG was able to meet and exceed through the delivery of the managed services offering. The client needed WTG to execute governance and continuous improvement efforts as well as supplement the existing client staff and skill sets necessary to deliver technology service excellence with rapid incident response. Based on the well-established relationship between the client and the WTG team, there was a natural and efficient integration of the WTG managed services. The client was able to leverage the environmental knowledge the WTG team possessed for continuity of service delivery that met all business expectations.

WTG Solution and Scope of Services

The WTG managed services team developed a three-tiered solution approach that ensured all objectives were achieved and business drivers were satisfied. The three-tiered solution was comprised of strategy, planning, and execution elements. The strategy portion of the solution defined how and what services would be delivered. The strategy consisted of the following components:

• Create and implement seamless & transparent extension of the client organization with senior engineers with an average of 15 years of technology support experience
• Implement & deliver a set of services to facilitate organizational extension
• Proactively address modernizations, redesigns, including Network refresh (Switches, Firewalls, SD WAN) and Vulnerability Assessment with remediation and hardening

The planning was developed to ensure that all execution was being delivered according to scalable and repeatable set of processes. All planning exercises addressed tracking and project management to support upgrades, remediations, operational maintenance and to develop continuous improvement processes. Experienced project managers were staffed to lead planning while aligning the strategy and planning into successful execution.

All execution was based on defined, mature, and customized processes and standard operating procedures per the client needs and requirements. Key aspects of the service delivery and execution included 100% remote service delivery, leveraging of existing client tools and infrastructure which included alerting, patching, and remote access. This approach ensured adherence to the client’s security policy and the effective delivery of services. WTG also filled existing client tool gaps with monitoring, ticketing, and email parsing tools that were necessary to efficiently manage the environment.

WTG has successfully managed fifty servers (physical and virtual), 50TB’s of data, wide area network (traditional and software-defined), core infrastructure components such as network devices and services across two datacenters located in the northeast and mid-Atlantic regions. Security was also a critical aspect of the service delivery. WTG provided Security Operations Center as a service offering.

Client Outcomes and Benefits Realized

WTG has successfully delivered managed services that has met all the client objectives. The client realized several benefits, that managed risk, enhanced capacities, and optimized cost. The primary benefits included the following:

• Achieving and consistently exceeding compliance with regulatory requirements related to security and operations of technology infrastructure
• Repurposed infrastructure technology staff to support business-critical applications driving significantly greater value to the business
• Additional technology support FTE hires were avoided resulting in investment with FTEs to do business-critical application support
• Client reduced infrastructure maintenance and support OPEX by 32%