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 leader in supporting the baseline network software and office productivity programs important to most small and mid-size businesses. As a Cisco-qualified partner with one of the largest teams of CCIE network experts in the U.S., Progent also can provide expertise for an ever more sophisticated collection of infrastructure products including Cisco Next Generation firewalls, routers and switches, VoIP solutions, and wireless networking. Furthermore, Progent's CISSP-Premier cybersecurity experts, CISM-certified security engineers, CISA-certified security audit consultants and GIAC-certified information assurance experts can provide a company-wide perspective on network security. Progent can also help you create advanced SIEM solutions for compliance with regulatory requirements for reporting security events.

The breadth and depth of Progent's consulting staff offer a special array of benefits to companies trying to increase the productivity of their information system within a realistic budget. These benefits include:

  • Best Practices
    Progent’s staff of Microsoft and Cisco Premier Certified experts average more than ten years of real-world industry experience, at the forefront of IT service, performing a wide range of technical tasks for an extensive mix of clients. Each Progent support professional shares a proven set of best practices which are incorporated into shared best practices standards that Progent instills in its consulting staff. This ensures that you get not only world-class IT help, but also a consultant with proven methods for using technical knowledge to resolve real-world network problems rapidly. Find out more about Progent's best practices for network consulting.

  • Value Pricing
    Progent's pricing policy is to charge for phone service and in-person help by the minute. Consequently, you are charged exclusively for delivered support. Progent does not demand a higher rate for emergency support, and Progent does not bill for travel time except for emergency calls where on-site work is less than four hours. In addition, Progent applies no startup charge and requires no retainer for services provided during regular business hours. Many support firms demand substantial minimum payments or charge in increments of fifteen minutes or more. Progent's small pricing granularity does away with huge bills for quick solutions so you will not be tempted to allow simple problems to stay unaddressed until they grow into major ones. Find out more about Progent's value pricing for IT outsourcing.

  • Full Documentation of IT Services
    Progent has developed a sophisticated support reporting system that stores and formats complete documentation for all delivered services. Unlike some independent consultants or local service firms who offer minimal documentation or specifics of services done, each service delivered by Progent is accompanied by comprehensive documentation. Every Progent consultant has access to the service reports sent by each staff member to each client. The practice of documenting and organizing support records allows more effective service and eliminates a variety of typical misfortunes such as when a support customer is virtually held hostage to a consultant who refuses to let go of the keys to the kingdom. Find out more about Progent's documentation of IT outsourcing services.

  • Knowledge Transfer
    Progent practices information transfer from Progent's support experts to clients. By teaching clients to handle problems that are within their scope, Progent is able to focus on providing high-value services where Progent has few competitors. Small companies who utilize trusted freelance consultants or who maintain internal support personnel benefit when Progent transfers information about new technology and proven processes to make their IT environments more robust, 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 Organizations
Progent offers a family of low-cost, fixed-price managed services designed to allow small and medium-size organizations to benefit from the same cutting-edge technology used by many of the industry's leading enterprises. Progent's ProSight series of network monitoring and management services addresses all critical areas of modern networking such as email content filtering, behavioral-based threat defense, automated backup and disaster recovery, network infrastructure monitoring and management, VM hosting, and IT asset documentation management. ProSight managed services include:

  • ProSight Active Security Monitoring: Endpoint Protection and Ransomware Defense
    ProSight Active Security Monitoring is an endpoint protection service that utilizes next generation behavior analysis tools to guard endpoint devices as well as physical and virtual servers against modern malware attacks such as ransomware and file-less exploits, which easily escape legacy signature-matching AV tools. ProSight Active Security Monitoring protects local and cloud resources and offers a unified platform to address the complete threat progression including filtering, identification, containment, remediation, and post-attack forensics. Top features include single-click rollback using Windows VSS and automatic network-wide immunization against newly discovered attacks. Read more about Progent's ProSight Active Security Monitoring endpoint protection and ransomware defense.

  • ProSight Enhanced Security Protection (ESP): Physical and Virtual Endpoint Security and Microsoft Exchange Filtering
    ProSight Enhanced Security Protection services offer ultra-affordable multi-layer protection for physical servers and VMs, desktops, mobile devices, and Exchange email. ProSight ESP uses adaptive security and modern behavior analysis for continuously monitoring and responding to security assaults from all attack vectors. ProSight ESP offers two-way firewall protection, intrusion alarms, endpoint control, and web filtering via leading-edge tools packaged within one agent accessible from a single control. Progent's security and virtualization consultants can help your business to design and implement a ProSight ESP deployment that meets your company's specific needs and that helps you achieve and demonstrate compliance with legal and industry information security standards. Progent will assist you define and implement policies that ProSight ESP will manage, and Progent will monitor your IT environment and react to alarms that require immediate attention. Progent's consultants can also help you to install and test a backup and restore solution like ProSight Data Protection Services (DPS) so you can get back in business rapidly from a potentially disastrous security attack such as ransomware. Learn more about Progent's ProSight Enhanced Security Protection (ESP) unified physical and virtual endpoint security and Exchange email filtering.

  • ProSight Data Protection Services: Managed Backup and Disaster Recovery
    ProSight Data Protection Services from Progent offer small and medium-sized businesses an affordable end-to-end service for secure backup/disaster recovery (BDR). Available at a fixed monthly rate, ProSight DPS automates and monitors your backup activities and allows fast restoration of vital data, apps and virtual machines that have become unavailable or corrupted as a result of hardware breakdowns, software glitches, natural disasters, human error, or malware attacks like ransomware. ProSight Data Protection Services can help you protect, recover and restore files, folders, applications, system images, plus Microsoft Hyper-V and VMware virtual machine images. Critical data can be protected on the cloud, to an on-promises device, or to both. Progent's BDR specialists can provide advanced expertise to set up ProSight Data Protection Services to to comply with government and industry regulatory standards such as HIPPA, FINRA, PCI and Safe Harbor and, whenever necessary, can assist you to recover your business-critical information. Learn more about ProSight DPS Managed Backup and Recovery.

  • ProSight Email Guard: Inbound and Outbound Spam Filtering and Data Leakage Protection
    ProSight Email Guard is Progent's spam filtering and email encryption service that uses the infrastructure of top information security companies to deliver web-based control and comprehensive security for all your inbound and outbound email. The powerful architecture of Progent's Email Guard managed service combines a Cloud Protection Layer with an on-premises security gateway device to offer complete defense against spam, viruses, Denial of Service (DoS) Attacks, Directory Harvest Attacks (DHAs), and other email-based threats. The Cloud Protection Layer serves as a first line of defense and keeps most threats from making it to your network firewall. This decreases your vulnerability to inbound threats and conserves system bandwidth and storage space. Email Guard's on-premises gateway appliance adds a deeper layer of inspection for incoming email. For outbound email, the on-premises gateway offers anti-virus and anti-spam filtering, policy-based Data Loss Prevention, and email encryption. The local gateway can also help Microsoft Exchange Server to track and safeguard internal email traffic that originates and ends within your corporate firewall. For more details, see Email Guard spam and content filtering.

  • ProSight WAN Watch: Infrastructure Management
    Progent’s ProSight WAN Watch is a network infrastructure monitoring and management service that makes it simple and inexpensive for smaller organizations to map, track, reconfigure and troubleshoot their connectivity appliances such as routers, firewalls, and wireless controllers plus servers, printers, client computers and other devices. Incorporating cutting-edge Remote Monitoring and Management technology, WAN Watch ensures that infrastructure topology diagrams are kept updated, captures and manages the configuration information of virtually all devices connected to your network, monitors performance, and generates alerts when problems are discovered. By automating time-consuming management activities, WAN Watch can knock hours off ordinary chores like making network diagrams, reconfiguring your network, locating appliances that require critical software patches, or resolving performance bottlenecks. Find out more details about ProSight WAN Watch infrastructure management consulting.

  • ProSight LAN Watch: Server and Desktop Monitoring Services
    ProSight LAN Watch is Progent’s server and desktop monitoring service that uses advanced remote monitoring and management (RMM) technology to help keep your network operating at peak levels by tracking the health of vital computers that power your business network. When ProSight LAN Watch uncovers a problem, an alarm is sent immediately to your specified IT management staff and your Progent consultant so all potential issues can be addressed before they have a chance to disrupt productivity Learn more 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 organization can have its critical servers and apps hosted in a secure Tier III data center on a fast virtual machine host set up and managed by Progent's IT support professionals. With Progent's ProSight Virtual Hosting model, the client retains ownership of the data, the operating system platforms, and the applications. Since the system is virtualized, it can be ported immediately to an alternate hardware solution without requiring a lengthy and difficult configuration procedure. With ProSight Virtual Hosting, you are not tied a single hosting provider. Learn more about ProSight Virtual Hosting services.

  • ProSight IT Asset Management: Network Infrastructure Documentation and Password Management Services
    ProSight IT Asset Management service is a cloud-based IT documentation management service that allows you to capture, update, find and safeguard data about your IT infrastructure, processes, applications, and services. You can instantly locate passwords or IP addresses and be warned automatically about impending expirations of SSL certificates ,domains or warranties. By cleaning up and organizing your IT documentation, you can eliminate as much as half of time spent trying to find critical information about your IT network. ProSight IT Asset Management includes a common location for holding and sharing all documents related to managing your network infrastructure like recommended procedures and How-To's. ProSight IT Asset Management also supports advanced automation for collecting and associating IT information. Whether you’re planning improvements, performing regular maintenance, or responding to an emergency, ProSight IT Asset Management gets you the knowledge you require when you need it. Learn more about ProSight IT Asset Management service.
ProSight Network Audits
Progent's ProSight Network Audits are a quick and affordable alternative for small and medium-size businesses to obtain an unbiased evaluation of the health of their network. Based on some of the leading remote monitoring and management tools in the industry, and supervised by Progent's world-class team of IT professionals, ProSight Network Audits help you see how closely the configuration of your core network assets conform to industry best practices. The Basic and Advanced versions of ProSight Network Audit services are offered at a low, one-time cost and deliver immediate ROI such as a cleaner Active Directory environment. Both versions also come with a year of state-of-the-art remote network monitoring and management. Advantages can include simpler management, better compliance with data security standards, more efficient utilization of IT resources, quicker troubleshooting, more dependable backup and restore, and less downtime. See more information about ProSight Network Audits IT infrastructure review.

The ProSight Ransomware Preparedness Report
The ProSight Ransomware Preparedness Report service is a low-cost service centered on a phone discussion with a Progent backup/recovery consultant. The interview is designed to help evaluate your organization's preparedness either to stop or recover rapidly following an assault by a ransomware strain such as Ryuk, WannaCry, MongoLock, or Hermes. Progent will consult with you directly to gather information about your existing AV defense and backup platform, and Progent will then produce a custom Basic Security and Best Practices Report detailing how you can apply best practices to build an efficient AV and backup/recovery system that meets your business needs. For additional information, visit 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, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and Google Cloud. 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, Amazon Web Marketing Service (WMS) development and troubleshooting, and Google Cloud integration consulting. Progent has more than 20 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 concise information on Progent's IT support offerings, check out Progent's Spec Sheets for IS Outsourcing and Network Monitoring Offerings, available in Adobe Acrobat format for easy 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.