Vandis Managed Services

Wireless infrastructure is a vital part of day to day business. 24/365 availability is essential. Vandis has a longtime client for whom we are redesigning and architecting their wireless infrastructure, with goals of continuous improvement and growth of the feature set. Without subject matter experts on staff, the client requested Vandis’ Managed Services offering to monitor and maintain their environment.

Solution

Vandis Managed Services provides three important client solutions: ChangeOps, OnCall, and Monitoring & Alerting. Vandis’ ChangeOps frees an organization’s resources by having Vandis manage their day to day tasks. Vandis OnCall allows quick access to a Vandis badged engineer with solution area expertise for efficient issue resolution. Vandis’ Monitoring & Alerting app provides a single pane of glass for viewing your network and security events. The client in question adopted Vandis ChangeOps & OnCall in the first deployment. Soon after, the client added Vandis Monitoring & Alerting to their arsenal. As a result, the client has a network management platform with real-time correlation, support, and enrichment. The client extended the project to an ongoing contract.

Results

• The Vandis team detected a dictionary brute force attack against the client’s internet edge router and promptly notified the client to protect their environment. Despite having a SOC monitor in their environment, Vandis was the only one that notified them of the attack.

• The Vandis team has a do better approach. We always look to pick the highest issue rates stemming from the Controllers and ClearPass, and provide remedies to reduce them. A perfect example: clearing up incoming event logs on ClearPass. Initially, the client was seeing about 100,000 Accept messages per day and about 85,000 Reject messages per day, which is excessive in a ClearPass-controlled environment. The Vandis team implemented machine learning, defining a twice-weekly report showing the client’s top ten problem users for that week. As a result, accept/reject numbers are reduced to a more-manageable daily 45,000 Accept and 10,000 Reject messages.

• Because the IT budget for fulltime wireless SMEs is frozen for many companies, Vandis services provides clients a constant set of eyes to manage and maintain their network for a fraction of the cost of a fulltime SME.

Since deployment, the Vandis team has a weekly Managed Services conference call with the client and in-person quarterly meetings. These meetings are used to go over everything from ticket queues, proactive tickets, and stats from the monitoring platform to inform the client on how their environment is performing.