Delivering High Wan Availability

Executive background
Manipal Education and Medical Group faced major issues on its WAN that resulted in downtime and improper functioning of applications. That’s when the group decided to opt for a managed services solution.

Company background
Manipal Education and Medical Group (MEMG) is one of Asia’s largest healthcare management groups. It is committed to three interwoven purposes: dissipating knowledge, applying knowledge and creating knowledge.

To this end, the group has been an innovator in the field of education, medicine and research. It is a leader in delivering global standards of excellence in education. It has also established a Stem Cell Research Centre. There are five group companies in MEMG. These are Manipal University, Sikkim Manipal University, Manipal Cure & Care, Manipal Health, and Manipal Universal Learning.

Business challenge
MEMG has presence in 40 locations across India. One of the major challenges that MEMG faced was the downtime of its Wide Area Network (WAN), and this led to improper functioning of the applications. The group had various tier 2 and tier 3 service providers and was finding it difficult to handle them. They were also unable to provide proactive support and services which impacted the daily operations. There were delays in provisioning and non-compliance to Service Level Agreements (SLAs).

Further, the group did not have integrated monitoring or management of its systems. So there was no single view of the performance of the links and devices on the WAN either.

“We did not have the internal strength to monitor, manage and maintain our WAN in terms of people, skills, products and tools and were looking for a provider who could help us to sort these issues with ease,” says Balakrishna Rao, CIO, Manipal Universal Learning.

MEMG wanted a service provider who could manage the coordination with various vendors and Internet Service Providers (ISPs). The group currently is on the MPLS network of BSNL which connects its 40 locations across India.
MEMG wanted a service provider who could constantly assess and review the health of the network and its resources, address security issues, suggest best practices, and bring in optimisation measures and improvements from time to time. The group was looking at a nation-wide partnership with a service provider. After a process of evaluation, MEMG chose Cisco’s Gold Premium Partner, Datacraft, as its managed service provider. The selection was based on the skills and capabilities to manage big projects. The presence of a full-fledged Network Operation Centre (NOC) with integrated tools and products for remote monitoring/management also was a key reason for Datacraft’s selection.

Solution
MEMG signed a three-year multi-sourcing contract with Datacraft to manage the WAN infrastructure comprising MPLS links, Cisco routers and firewalls for its five group companies across 40 locations.

Proactive, remote monitoring of infrastructure
Datacraft monitors and analyses the various devices that are connected to the MEMG network (both education and hospital) through the NOC in Bangalore. The support centre is proactive and can identify if a link or router is about to collapse. The support team can then take preventive measures to ensure that there is no downtime.

Managing ISPs to ensure adherence to SLAs
If one of the 40 locations where MEMG is operational gets disconnected from the network, as this happens, the global support centre swings into action and raises a ticket to BSNL. Support personnel from Datacraft and BSNL visit the site where the fault has occurred and analyse the reason for the connection failure. This could be because of various issues like cable failure, modem not working, etc. Datacraft works in sync with BSNL to fix the issue as per the SLAs.

Providing onsite support
Datacraft has also deployed IT personnel within the Manipal premises, who look after IT issues such as upgrading applications, installation of programs, etc. There is a process-based approach to call management and problem resolution, complete with escalation.

Managing Cisco equipment
Datacraft also manages the various Cisco devices connected to the network of Manipal as MEMG has signed up for the ‘Uptime powered by Cisco’ support service, which ensures quick problem resolution and replacement of faulty equipment. ‘Uptime powered by Cisco’ ensures that Cisco works together with Datacraft to provide MEMG world class support. In case of critical situations MEMG has the option to involve Cisco. MEMG also gets access to Cisco’s technical resources. This service also has tight SLAs that ensure speedy resolution and restoration at MEMG.

Business value
With Datacraft now managing the network and IT services for MEMG, the group has in place an excellent process for change management, incident management, reporting and reviews. Datacraft and Cisco have provided a portal which gives a dashboard view of how the infrastructure is performing at any given point in time.

Datacraft has helped the group in providing technology solutions that ensure high availability of the network infrastructure. Datacraft also acts as a consultant for the group by providing insights on various available technologies and solutions that could be adopted to enable the growth of the group.

Rao informs that MEMG is already engaged with a couple of other end-to-end solution projects with Datacraft. “We want to grow on the IT maturity curve and adopt new solutions and technologies to keep our operations efficient and agile,” he says.

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By: GB Kumar

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G.B. Kumar is the Senior Vice President for Customer Advocacy, Cisco India and SAARC. He is responsible for transforming Cisco India towards a services oriented and solutions driven approach and increasing the level of services led interactions.