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 an acknowledged leader in supporting the core network software and office productivity applications important to most small and mid-size businesses. As a Cisco-certified partner with among the largest teams of CCIE accredited network technology experts in the U.S., Progent also offers help for an increasingly sophisticated array 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 professionals, CISA-qualified security audit specialists and GIAC-authorized information assurance professionals can provide a company-wide view of network security. Progent can also help you design and operate comprehensive security information and event management (SIEM) solutions so you can comply with regulatory requirements for promptly reporting incidents.

The scope and depth of Progent's engineering staff offer a special set of benefits to companies wishing to increase the productivity of their IT system within an affordable budget. These benefits include:

  • Best Practices
    Progent’s team of Microsoft and Cisco Premier experts average more than ten years of hands-on industry background, at the forefront of IT support, executing a broad range of IT projects for an extensive mix of customers. Each Progent consultant shares a proven collection of best practices which are incorporated into company-wide best practices training that Progent instills in its consulting staff. This guarantees that you get not only world-class IT skills, but also a consultant with proven approaches for applying technical knowledge to resolve actual IT problems rapidly. Find out more about Progent's best practices for network consulting.

  • Value Pricing
    Progent's pricing policy is to charge for online service and on-premises help per minute. Consequently, you pay exclusively for delivered support. Progent does not impose a higher rate for priority service, and Progent does not charge for travel time except for emergency support where on-site time is less than four hours. In addition, Progent applies no registration charge and asks no retainer for support services provided during normal business hours. Many service firms impose substantial minimum payments or charge in increments of a quarter hour or more. Progent's one-minute billing granularity avoids huge invoices for fast solutions so you will not be tempted to permit simple issues to fester until they grow into big ones. Find out more about Progent's value pricing for IT outsourcing.

  • Full Documentation of IT Services
    Progent has created a sophisticated support reporting system that records and formats complete documentation for all billed support activities. Unlike many independent consultants or local service organizations who provide minimal documentation or details of services performed, every service provided by Progent is tracked by full documentation. Every Progent consultant has use of the support documentation sent by each staff member to each customer. The practice of detailing and organizing service records results in more effective support and eliminates a slew of common problems such as when a support client is virtually held captive 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 handle technical issues that are within their comfort zone, Progent can focus on offering hard-to-find skills where Progent faces little competition. Small businesses who work with trusted independent consultants or who employ internal IT staffs benefit when Progent passes on knowledge about critical technology and tested methodologies to make their networks more reliable, secure, and productive. 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.

ProSight Fixed-price Managed Services for Small and Medium Size Businesses
Progent provides a selection of low-cost, flat-rate managed services designed to allow small and mid-size organizations to utilize the same best-of-breed technology deployed by some of the world's top corporations. Progent's ProSight series of network monitoring and management services covers all key areas of modern networking such as email protection, behavioral-based threat defense, cloud-based backup and disaster recovery, infrastructure health monitoring, virtual server cloud hosting, and IT resources documentation management. ProSight managed services offered by Progent include:

  • ProSight Active Security Monitoring: Endpoint Protection and Ransomware Defense
    Progent's ProSight Active Security Monitoring (ASM) is an endpoint protection (EPP) solution that utilizes next generation behavior analysis technology to guard endpoint devices and servers and VMs against new malware attacks such as ransomware and file-less exploits, which easily evade traditional signature-based anti-virus tools. ProSight ASM safeguards local and cloud resources and offers a unified platform to address the entire malware attack progression including protection, identification, mitigation, cleanup, and forensics. Key features include one-click rollback using Windows VSS and automatic network-wide immunization against newly discovered threats. Read more about Progent's ProSight Active Security Monitoring (ASM) endpoint protection and ransomware defense.

  • ProSight Enhanced Security Protection (ESP): Endpoint Protection and Exchange Email Filtering
    ProSight Enhanced Security Protection managed services deliver affordable multi-layer security for physical servers and virtual machines, desktops, mobile devices, and Exchange Server. ProSight ESP uses adaptive security and advanced heuristics for round-the-clock monitoring and reacting to security assaults from all vectors. ProSight ESP provides two-way firewall protection, intrusion alarms, endpoint control, and web filtering via leading-edge tools incorporated within a single agent managed from a unified control. Progent's data protection and virtualization consultants can help your business to plan and implement a ProSight ESP deployment that addresses your organization's unique needs and that allows you achieve and demonstrate compliance with government and industry information protection standards. Progent will help you specify and configure security policies that ProSight ESP will enforce, and Progent will monitor your network and react to alerts that require urgent attention. Progent can also assist your company to set up and test a backup and disaster recovery solution such as ProSight Data Protection Services (DPS) so you can recover rapidly from a destructive cyber attack such as ransomware. Find out more about Progent's ProSight Enhanced Security Protection unified physical and virtual endpoint security and Microsoft Exchange filtering.

  • ProSight Data Protection Services: Managed Backup and Disaster Recovery
    ProSight Data Protection Services from Progent offer small and mid-sized businesses an affordable and fully managed solution for reliable backup/disaster recovery. Available at a low monthly cost, ProSight DPS automates your backup activities and enables fast recovery of vital files, apps and virtual machines that have become unavailable or damaged as a result of component breakdowns, software bugs, disasters, human mistakes, or malicious attacks such as ransomware. ProSight DPS can help you protect, retrieve and restore files, folders, apps, system images, as well as Hyper-V and VMware virtual machine images. Critical data can be backed up on the cloud, to an on-promises storage device, or to both. Progent's backup and recovery specialists can deliver advanced expertise to set up ProSight Data Protection Services to be compliant with regulatory requirements such as HIPPA, FINRA, PCI and Safe Harbor and, whenever needed, can assist you to recover your business-critical information. Find out 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 and virus filtering and email encryption service that incorporates the technology of leading data security companies to deliver web-based management and world-class protection for your inbound and outbound email. The hybrid structure of Progent's Email Guard managed service combines cloud-based filtering with a local gateway device to provide advanced protection against spam, viruses, Dos Attacks, Directory Harvest Attacks (DHAs), and other email-borne threats. The cloud filter acts as a preliminary barricade and blocks most unwanted email from making it to your security perimeter. This reduces your exposure to external attacks and saves system bandwidth and storage space. Email Guard's onsite gateway appliance provides a further layer of inspection for incoming email. For outgoing email, the onsite security gateway offers anti-virus and anti-spam protection, protection against data leaks, and email encryption. The onsite gateway can also help Microsoft Exchange Server to track and protect internal email that originates and ends inside your corporate firewall. For more details, see ProSight Email Guard spam filtering and data leakage protection.

  • ProSight WAN Watch: Network Infrastructure Remote Monitoring and Management
    ProSight WAN Watch is a network infrastructure monitoring and management service that makes it simple and affordable for smaller organizations to diagram, monitor, optimize and debug their networking appliances such as routers and switches, firewalls, and load balancers as well as servers, printers, client computers and other devices. Incorporating cutting-edge Remote Monitoring and Management (RMM) technology, ProSight WAN Watch ensures that infrastructure topology maps are kept current, copies and manages the configuration information of almost all devices on your network, monitors performance, and sends alerts when potential issues are detected. By automating time-consuming management processes, WAN Watch can knock hours off ordinary chores like network mapping, expanding your network, locating devices that require important updates, or isolating performance issues. Find out more about ProSight WAN Watch infrastructure management services.

  • ProSight LAN Watch: Server and Desktop Monitoring Services
    ProSight LAN Watch is Progent’s server and desktop monitoring service that incorporates advanced remote monitoring and management (RMM) techniques to keep your IT system running at peak levels by checking the health of critical assets that drive your business network. When ProSight LAN Watch uncovers a problem, an alert is transmitted automatically to your specified IT management staff and your assigned Progent engineering consultant so that all potential issues can be resolved before they have a chance to impact your network Find out more details about ProSight LAN Watch server and desktop monitoring services.

  • ProSight Virtual Hosting: Hosted VMs at Progent's Tier III Data Center
    With Progent's ProSight Virtual Hosting service, a small or mid-size organization can have its key servers and apps hosted in a protected fault tolerant data center on a high-performance virtual host set up and managed by Progent's network support experts. Under the ProSight Virtual Hosting service model, the customer retains ownership of the data, the operating system platforms, and the applications. Because the environment is virtualized, it can be ported easily to an alternate hardware solution without a time-consuming and difficult configuration procedure. With ProSight Virtual Hosting, you are not tied one hosting service. Learn more about ProSight Virtual Hosting services.

  • ProSight IT Asset Management: Network Infrastructure Documentation and Password Management Services
    ProSight IT Asset Management service is an IT infrastructure documentation management service that makes it easy to create, update, find and safeguard information related to your IT infrastructure, procedures, applications, and services. You can instantly locate passwords or IP addresses and be alerted about upcoming expirations of SSLs or warranties. By cleaning up and managing your network documentation, you can save as much as half of time wasted looking for critical information about your network. ProSight IT Asset Management features a centralized repository for storing and collaborating on all documents related to managing your business network like standard operating procedures and How-To's. ProSight IT Asset Management also offers a high level of automation for gathering and associating IT information. Whether you’re making enhancements, doing regular maintenance, or reacting to a crisis, ProSight IT Asset Management gets you the data you require the instant you need it. Find out more about ProSight IT Asset Management service.
ProSight Network Audits
Progent's ProSight Network Audits offer a fast and affordable alternative for small and mid-size organizations to get an unbiased assessment of the health of their IT system. Based on some of the leading remote monitoring and management (RMM) tools available, and supervised by Progent's certified group of information technology professionals, ProSight Network Audits show you how well the configuration of your core infrastructure assets adhere to industry leading practices. Both the Basic and Advanced versions of ProSight Network Audit services are available at a low, one-time cost and deliver instant benefits such as a more manageable Active Directory (AD) environment. Both versions also come with a year of advanced remote network monitoring and management (RMM). Advantages can include lower-cost network management, improved compliance with information security requirements, more efficient utilization of network assets, quicker troubleshooting, more dependable backup and restore, and less downtime. Learn more about ProSight Network Audits IT infrastructure assessment.

The ProSight Ransomware Preparedness Report Service
The ProSight Ransomware Preparedness Report service is an affordable service centered on a brief discussion with a Progent backup/recovery consultant. The interview is designed to assess your organization's ability to block or recover rapidly following an assault by a ransomware variant like Ryuk, WannaCry, MongoLock, or Hermes. Progent will work with you directly to collect information about your existing security profile and backup/recovery system, and Progent will then produce a written Basic Security and Best Practices Report detailing how you can follow best practices to create a cost-effective security and backup environment that aligns with your business requirements. For details, visit Progent's 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.

For additional information on our IT support packages, refer to Progent's Spec Sheets for IT Outsourced Services and Server Monitoring Packages, accessible in PDF format for convenient downloading.

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: