Overview
Businesses with 100 to 250 network users have traditionally been an underserved segment of the IT outsourcing market. The cost structures and service delivery models of large third-party support organizations make them too expensive for most mid-size businesses, who typically have small IT budgets with which to support IT networks whose complexity and sophistication are comparable to the information systems of larger enterprises. Progent's service delivery model, which takes full advantage of remote support, virtual office infrastructure and proactive network monitoring, dramatically reduces IT support costs while offering enterprise-level service from certified, world-class experts in a broad range of technologies.

Progent's co-sourcing services allow your business to find the right balance between in-house and outside support by leveraging the capability of your in-house IT staff with the in-depth expertise of Progent's engineers. By delivering effective support when you need it, providing specialists for critical applications, minimizing travel costs through remote support, offering unique services such as customized, automated server monitoring, and charging only for the services you use, Progent gives you an affordable way to maximize the business value of your network.

Why Progent Makes Sense for Mid-size Businesses
Progent's staff of certified IT professionals have extensive experience with enterprise networks, allowing mid-size businesses to achieve world-class IT support without having to maintain large internal IT organizations or absorb the high cost of outsourcing network support to large national service organizations.

Working with Progent allows your mid-size business to:

  • Avoid Turning IT Management Into Crisis Management
    Companies with 100 to 250 network clients often have sophisticated, enterprise-class IT infrastructures, but rarely have internal IT staffs with the depth and breadth of technical expertise to provide all the IT support that complex networks require. Internal resources are often overworked and budgetary realities do not permit hiring additional full-time IT staff.

    These environments can be subject to higher than average employee turnover, which often leads to situations where replacement support staff must focus on keeping the network running rather than enhancing it. Lacking in knowledge of the history, design, implementation, and architecture of the network, and with little time available between crises, new support staff are unlikely to be able to plan and implement effective network upgrades or migrate the system to keep up with changing business requirements.

  • Let Senior Management Focus on Business, Not Network Hassles
    Many mid-size businesses are aggressively moving to outsourced support models for information technology because building up large internal IT staffs seldom pays off with strategic business advantages. Attempting to handle all IT service issues in-house can bog down senior management with the details of IT problems, yielding poor returns for time invested by such top talent.

    Companies need reliable, feature-rich, secure, and fault-tolerant IT environments to support their mission critical applications, but they recognize that it makes little business sense to own and build such systems themselves or to manage large internal staffs of IT personnel. Smart outsourcing or co-sourcing allows companies to concentrate their internal resources on areas that will bring them the greatest strategic and competitive advantages in the markets they serve.

  • Migrate Quickly to the Best Network Technology
    Periodic economic downswings have caused many IT environments to become woefully out of date as a result of IT budgets being slashed during a crisis but not adequately restored during a recovery. The starvation diets forced upon many business networks has created a burden of outdated information systems. This problem becomes apparent when the demand for new applications and customer-centric IT solutions can’t be easily supported on legacy systems. Out-of-date technologies also make it difficult to benefit from modern computing paradigms such as hydrid models that combine public clouds with local datacenters.

    Increasingly, companies are being challenged by upstart competitors who are not saddled with legacy environments and can quickly introduce state-of-the-art, customer-friendly applications such as web-based eCommerce, vender extranets, customer portals, BYOD, and unified communications. Often such major initiatives can't be carried out solely with existing resources. Adding to full-time head count seldom makes long-term economic sense for project-specific work, and companies typically don’t have the time to bring resources up to speed for business-critical projects. In these circumstances, it can be very cost effective to engage outsourced resources that can solve problems immediately and transfer knowledge efficiently.

Unique Advantages of Working with Progent
As a Microsoft-certified consulting firm, Progent is recognized expert at the core network software and productivity programs used by the majority of small and medium-size companies. As a Cisco-certified partner with one of the biggest teams of CCIE accredited network technology experts in the country, Progent also can provide expertise for an ever more sophisticated array of network technologies such as Cisco Next Generation firewalls, switches, routers, voice-over-IP options, and wireless access. Furthermore, Progent's CISSP-Premier cybersecurity experts, CISM-certified security engineers, CISA-certified security audit consultants and GIAC-authorized information assurance experts can provide a business-wide view of network protection. Progent can also help you design and operate comprehensive security information and event management (SIEM) solutions so you can comply with government mandates for promptly reporting security incidents.

The scope and depth of Progent's engineering team bring a unique array of advantages to companies wishing to maximize the productivity of their information system within a realistic budget. These advantages include:

  • Best Practices
    Progent’s team of Microsoft and Cisco Premier Certified consultants average longer than a decade of real-world professional background, at the front lines of network support, performing a wide variety of technical projects for a large mix of clients. Every Progent support professional shares a refined collection of best practices which are combined into company-wide best practices standards that Progent instills in its support staff. This guarantees that you get not just expert IT capability, but also a consultant with field-tested methods for using technical knowledge to repair real-world network problems quickly. Find out more about Progent's best practices for network consulting.

  • Value Pricing
    Progent's pricing policy is to bill for phone support and in-person help per minute. As a result, you are charged just for received services. Progent does not impose a more expensive rate for priority service, and Progent does not bill for travel time except for urgent calls where on-site time is less than four hours. In addition, Progent applies no service activation fee and requires no monthly commitment for services provided during regular business hours. Many service organizations impose substantial minimum payments or bill in increments of fifteen minutes or longer. Progent's one-minute billing granularity eliminates giant invoices for fast repairs so you will not be tempted to permit less critical issues to fester until they become big ones. Find out more about Progent's value pricing for IT outsourcing.

  • Full Documentation of IT Services
    Progent has created a sophisticated service reporting system that stores and formats complete documentation for all billed support activities. Unlike some freelance consultants or small service firms who provide scant documentation or specifics of services performed, every service provided by Progent is tracked by full documentation. Each Progent staff member has access to the service reports sent by each consultant to every client. The practice of detailing and archiving support records allows more effective support and avoids a slew of common misfortunes such as when a service customer is virtually held hostage to a consultant who refuses to let go of vital service information. Find out more about Progent's documentation of IT outsourcing services.

  • Knowledge Transfer
    Progent practices knowledge transfer from Progent's consultants to customers. By teaching clients to deal with technical issues that are within their scope, Progent can concentrate on providing hard-to-find skills where Progent has few competitors. Small companies who utilize trusted freelance service providers or who maintain in-house support personnel benefit when Progent transfers information about new technology and tested processes to make their networks more reliable, protected, and efficient. Find out more about Progent's knowledge transfer services.

Service Delivery Options Available for Mid-size Businesses
To suit the needs and budgets of mid-size businesses, Progent offers a variety of options for delivering support, troubleshooting and consulting services. Options include nationwide remote support, on-site service in most zip codes in the U.S., and 24x7 network monitoring with automated alerts. Find out more about Progent's service delivery options for mid-size businesses.

ProSight Managed Services
Progent's ProSight portfolio of managed services offers end-to-end support for specific areas of IT management. These services are billed at a flat monthly rate and utilize advanced remote monitoring and management (RMM) technology to deliver enterprise-class network management solutions at budget-friendly prices.

Progent's ProSight Flat-rate Managed IT Services for Small and Medium Size Businesses
Progent provides a selection of budget-friendly, fixed-price services designed to allow small and mid-size businesses to utilize the same best-of-breed technology deployed by some of the industry's top corporations. The ProSight suite of outsourced network management services addresses all key facets of modern networking such as email protection, behavioral-based threat defense, cloud-based backup/recovery, network infrastructure monitoring and management, VM hosting, and IT asset documentation management. ProSight managed services offered by Progent include:

  • ProSight Active Security Monitoring: Endpoint Protection and Ransomware Defense
    ProSight Active Security Monitoring is an endpoint protection (EPP) solution that utilizes cutting edge behavior machine learning technology to defend endpoint devices and physical and virtual servers against new malware attacks such as ransomware and file-less exploits, which easily escape legacy signature-based AV products. ProSight ASM safeguards on-premises and cloud resources and offers a single platform to address the complete threat lifecycle including blocking, identification, containment, cleanup, and forensics. Top capabilities include one-click rollback using Windows VSS and real-time system-wide immunization against newly discovered attacks. Learn more about Progent's ProSight Active Security Monitoring next-generation endpoint protection and ransomware recovery.

  • ProSight Enhanced Security Protection (ESP): Endpoint Security and Microsoft Exchange Email Filtering
    Progent's ProSight Enhanced Security Protection (ESP) managed services deliver economical multi-layer security for physical and virtual servers, workstations, mobile devices, and Exchange email. ProSight ESP utilizes adaptive security and modern behavior analysis for round-the-clock monitoring and responding to security threats from all attack vectors. ProSight ESP offers two-way firewall protection, penetration alerts, device management, and web filtering through leading-edge tools packaged within one agent managed from a single console. Progent's security and virtualization experts can assist you to plan and configure a ProSight ESP environment that addresses your organization's unique needs and that allows you demonstrate compliance with legal and industry data security standards. Progent will help you specify and implement policies that ProSight ESP will manage, and Progent will monitor your network and react to alerts that call for immediate attention. Progent can also assist you to set up and test a backup and restore solution such as ProSight Data Protection Services (DPS) so you can recover rapidly from a potentially disastrous security attack like ransomware. Learn more about Progent's ProSight Enhanced Security Protection unified endpoint protection and Microsoft Exchange email filtering.

  • ProSight Data Protection Services: Managed Backup and Disaster Recovery
    ProSight Data Protection Services provide small and mid-sized organizations an affordable end-to-end solution for reliable backup/disaster recovery. Available at a fixed monthly rate, ProSight Data Protection Services automates and monitors your backup activities and allows fast recovery of critical data, applications and VMs that have become unavailable or damaged as a result of hardware failures, software glitches, natural disasters, human mistakes, or malicious attacks like ransomware. ProSight Data Protection Services can help you protect, recover and restore files, folders, applications, system images, as well as Hyper-V and VMware virtual machine images. Important data can be protected on the cloud, to a local device, or mirrored to both. Progent's cloud backup consultants can provide world-class support to set up ProSight Data Protection Services to to comply with government and industry regulatory standards like HIPPA, FINRA, PCI and Safe Harbor and, when needed, can help you to restore your business-critical data. Learn more about ProSight DPS Managed Cloud Backup.

  • ProSight Email Guard: Inbound and Outbound Spam Filtering and Data Leakage Protection
    ProSight Email Guard is Progent's spam filtering service that incorporates the technology of leading data security vendors to deliver centralized management and comprehensive security for all your inbound and outbound email. The powerful structure of Progent's Email Guard combines cloud-based filtering with a local security gateway appliance to provide complete defense against spam, viruses, Denial of Service (DoS) Attacks, Directory Harvest Attacks, and other email-borne threats. The Cloud Protection Layer serves as a first line of defense and keeps the vast majority of unwanted email from making it to your security perimeter. This decreases your vulnerability to external attacks and saves system bandwidth and storage. Email Guard's on-premises security gateway device adds a further level of inspection for incoming email. For outgoing email, the on-premises security gateway provides anti-virus and anti-spam filtering, DLP, and email encryption. The on-premises security gateway can also help Exchange Server to monitor and safeguard internal email that originates and ends within your security perimeter. For more details, see Email Guard spam and content filtering.

  • ProSight WAN Watch: Infrastructure Management
    ProSight WAN Watch is an infrastructure management service that makes it easy and inexpensive for smaller organizations to diagram, track, reconfigure and troubleshoot their networking appliances like routers and switches, firewalls, and load balancers as well as servers, endpoints and other networked devices. Using state-of-the-art RMM technology, ProSight WAN Watch ensures that network diagrams are always updated, copies and manages the configuration of virtually all devices on your network, monitors performance, and generates notices when problems are discovered. By automating time-consuming management activities, WAN Watch can knock hours off ordinary tasks like network mapping, reconfiguring your network, locating devices that require important updates, or isolating performance bottlenecks. Learn more details about ProSight WAN Watch infrastructure management services.

  • ProSight LAN Watch: Server and Desktop Remote Monitoring Services
    ProSight LAN Watch is Progent’s server and desktop monitoring service that incorporates advanced remote monitoring and management (RMM) technology to keep your IT system operating at peak levels by checking the health of critical computers that power your business network. When ProSight LAN Watch uncovers an issue, an alarm is sent automatically to your specified IT management personnel and your assigned Progent engineering consultant so that any potential problems can be resolved before they can impact your network Find out more details about ProSight LAN Watch server and desktop monitoring services.

  • ProSight Virtual Hosting: Hosted Virtual Machines at Progent's World-class Data Center
    With ProSight Virtual Hosting service, a small or mid-size organization can have its key servers and applications hosted in a secure Tier III data center on a fast virtual host set up and managed by Progent's IT support experts. Under the ProSight Virtual Hosting model, the customer owns the data, the operating system software, and the applications. Since the system is virtualized, it can be moved easily to a different hardware solution without a lengthy and technically risky configuration process. With ProSight Virtual Hosting, your business is not locked into one hosting service. Find out more about ProSight Virtual Hosting services.

  • ProSight IT Asset Management: Network Infrastructure Documentation and Password Management
    ProSight IT Asset Management service is a cloud-based IT documentation management service that allows you to create, update, find and safeguard information related to your network infrastructure, processes, applications, and services. You can instantly locate passwords or IP addresses and be alerted about impending expirations of SSLs ,domains or warranties. By updating and managing your IT documentation, you can save as much as half of time wasted trying to find critical information about your network. ProSight IT Asset Management includes a centralized repository for holding and sharing all documents related to managing your network infrastructure like standard operating procedures (SOPs) and self-service instructions. ProSight IT Asset Management also supports advanced automation for gathering and associating IT information. Whether you’re making improvements, performing regular maintenance, or reacting to a crisis, ProSight IT Asset Management gets you the information you require the instant you need it. Find out more about Progent's ProSight IT Asset Management service.
ProSight Network Audits
Progent's ProSight Network Audits are a quick and low-cost way for small and medium-size organizations to obtain an unbiased evaluation of the overall health of their IT system. Based on a selection of the leading remote monitoring and management tools in the industry, and supervised by Progent's world-class group of information technology professionals, ProSight Network Audits help you see how closely the deployment of your essential network devices conform to industry leading practices. The Basic and Advanced versions of ProSight Network Audit services are available at a budget-friendly, one-time cost and provide instant benefits like a more manageable Active Directory (AD) system. Both also come with a year of state-of-the-art remote network monitoring and management (RMM). Advantages can include lower-cost management, better compliance with information security requirements, higher utilization of network resources, faster troubleshooting, more dependable backup and recovery, and higher availability. Learn more about ProSight Network Audits IT infrastructure review.

The ProSight Ransomware Preparedness Report
The ProSight Ransomware Preparedness Report service is a low-cost service based on a brief interview with a Progent information assurance consultant. The fact-finding interview is intended to help assess your organization's ability to stop or recover rapidly following an assault by a ransomware strain like Ryuk, WannaCry, NotPetya, or Hermes. Progent will work with you directly to gather information about your existing security profile and backup platform, and Progent will then produce a written Basic Security and Best Practices Report document describing how you can follow industry best practices to create an efficient AV and backup environment that aligns with your company's requirements. For additional information, refer to The ProSight Ransomware Preparedness Report Service.

Security Services
Progent offers a wide range of network security services to help businesses to identify and eliminate security vulnerabilities, defend against attacks, and recover from successful penetrations. Progent can provide remote and on-premises security consulting and also has developed economical fixed-cost security evaluation packages to complement Progent's regular by-the-minute billing. Progent's security assessment packages provide businesses with an economical way to comply with security standards mandated by state regulators or by customers.

Hosting Services
Progent's application hosting services such as Hosting Services for Microsoft Exchange offer a secure, affordable, and hassle-free alternative for managing mission-critical applications by combining the dependability of a world-class data center with the expertise of Progent's Microsoft-certified support team. Progent's ProSight Virtual Hosting Service gives midsize businesses a cost-effective option for hosting a variety of software platforms and key applications in a secure, fault-tolerant data center on a high-performance virtual host configured and maintained by Progent's network support experts.

Hybrid Cloud Integration Services
Progent can provide advanced online consulting to help businesses integrate their networks with public clouds such as Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services (AWS). Progent can assist organizations of all sizes to design and administer cost-effective environments that support Windows and Linux operating systems and apps in both cloud-based systems and in hybrid network models that utilize on-premises resources along with public clouds. To help you efficiently incorporate public cloud computing services into your IT ecosystem, Progent offers a variety of cloud integration services such as Office 365 integration with on-premises Exchange, Microsoft Azure planning and integration, Amazon AWS migration and support, and Amazon Web Marketing Service (WMS) development and troubleshooting. Progent has more than 15 years of experience providing high-level online consulting services and can help you successfully carry out cloud migration projects and quickly solve technical problems.

Onsite Support at the QTS Sacramento Colocation Center
The QTS (formerly Herakles) Internet Data Center is situated in the seismically-stable Natomas neighborhood of Sacramento. For businesses currently utilizing the QTS Sacramento data center as a colocation facility or planning on migrating their primary or disaster recovery system to the QTS data center, Progent can provide a range of affordable services that include data center migration, equipment deployment and upgrades, network optimization, comprehensive project management, virtual server expertise, remote network monitoring, streamlined network administration, software development, disaster recovery planning, data security evaluation, and the use of Progent's Test Lab. Find out more about Progent's QTS data center consulting services.

The Progent Test Lab
The Progent Test and Design Lab is a room at the QTS Internet Data Center with a variety of dedicated computers and network support equipment that can be utilized remotely or on premises to accommodate piloting, evaluations, capacity modeling, troubleshooting, business continuity simulation, education, and additional purposes to help Progent's clients successfully carry out major IT initiatives. Learn more about Progent's Test Lab at the QTS Data Center.

Virtualization Expertise
Progent can provide expert consulting to help midsize businesses efficiently deploy advanced virtual server platforms in order to save money, improve reliability, and streamline disaster recovery. Progent offers VMware vSphere integration, VMware Site Recovery Manager consulting, VMware NSX virtual network design and deployment, Windows Server 2016 Hyper-V consulting, Windows Server 2012 R2 Hyper-V planning and deployment, and Citrix XenServer expertise. For delivering virtual Windows desktops and applications, Progent's Citrix-certified engineers can provide Citrix XenDesktop support and Citrix XenApp consulting. Progent's engineers can help midsize businesses design networks that get the full benefit of virtualization, implement virtual servers and desktops to enhance network performance, dependability, and manageability while cutting expenses, create and validate business continuity procedures that reduce downtime in the event of a catastrophic network failure, and provide continuing consulting and support for virtualized environments.

Microsoft System Center Operations Manager-based Network Support Packages
Progent has developed special Network Support Packages based on the automated problem detection and analysis capabilities of Microsoft System Center Operations Manager, a powerful network management platform that monitors the reliability, throughput, and security of your network servers and alerts you to problems before they can impact your productivity. Progent's Network Support Packages also include network evaluation, security assessment, Help Desk support, and the design of secure data links between your system and Progent’s support engineers. Find out more about Progent's special Network Support Packages for cost-effective IT support outsourcing.

To find additional details about our IT support offerings, refer to our Spec Sheets for IS Support and Network Monitoring Offerings, available in Acrobat files for convenient printing.

For an example of how Microsoft Operations Manager helped a business achieve enterprise-class network management, read the Microsoft Operations Manager Case Study.

To contact Progent about Network Support Packages for mid-size businesses, call 1-800-993-9400 or visit Contact Progent. More topics of interest: