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 baseline system software and office productivity applications used by most small and medium-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 complex array of infrastructure technologies including Cisco Next Generation firewalls, switches, routers, voice-over-IP options, and wireless networking. In addition, Progent's CISSP-Premier cybersecurity consultants, CISM-authorized security engineers, CISA-certified security audit consultants and GIAC-certified information assurance experts offer a company-wide perspective on system security. Progent can also help you create comprehensive SIEM solutions so you can comply with government mandates for promptly reporting security events.

The scope and size of Progent's consulting team bring a unique set of benefits to businesses wishing to increase the business value of their IT system within a reasonable budget. These advantages include:

  • Best Practices
    Progent’s staff of Microsoft and Cisco Premier Certified experts average more than a decade of hands-on industry experience, at the front lines of IT support, executing a wide variety of IT projects for a large array of customers. Every Progent consultant shares a proven collection of leading practices which are incorporated into company-wide best practices standards that Progent teaches its support personnel. This ensures that you get not just world-class technical capability, but also a consultant with proven approaches for applying technical knowledge to fix real-world IT problems rapidly. Find out more about Progent's best practices for network consulting.

  • Value Pricing
    Progent's pricing model is to charge for phone service and on-premises help by the minute. As a result, you owe exclusively for delivered support. Progent does not impose a higher rate for priority support, and Progent does not charge for travel except for emergency support where on-site work is less than four hours. In addition, Progent imposes no startup fee and asks no retainer for support services delivered during regular working hours. Many support organizations demand large minimum payments or charge in increments of fifteen minutes or more. Progent's small billing granularity eliminates huge bills for quick fixes so you won't be tempted to allow minor issues 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 created a sophisticated service reporting system that stores and formats detailed documentation for all delivered support activities. Unlike many freelance consultants or local support organizations who offer scant documentation or details of tasks performed, each service delivered by Progent is accompanied by comprehensive documentation. Each Progent consultant has use of the service reports sent by every consultant to each client. The discipline of detailing and archiving service activity results in more effective service and eliminates a slew of common misfortunes such as when a support client is effectively held hostage to a consultant who won’t let go of the keys to the kingdom. Find out more about Progent's documentation of IT outsourcing services.

  • Knowledge Transfer
    Progent practices knowledge transfer from Progent's support experts to customers. By educating customers to resolve problems that are within their comfort zone, Progent can focus on providing hard-to-find services where Progent faces little competition. Small companies who work with familiar independent consultants or who employ in-house IT staffs benefit when Progent passes on information about new technology and tested methodologies to make their networks more robust, 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 Flat-rate Managed Services for Small and Medium Size Organizations
Progent provides a family of affordable, flat-rate services designed to enable small and mid-size organizations to benefit from the same best-of-breed technology deployed by some of the industry's top corporations. The ProSight line of outsourced network management services addresses all key aspects of modern networking such as email content filtering, security and compliance, cloud-based backup/recovery, network infrastructure management, virtual server hosting, and IT asset documentation management. ProSight managed services include:

  • ProSight Active Security Monitoring: Endpoint Protection and Ransomware Defense
    ProSight Active Security Monitoring (ASM) is an endpoint protection service that incorporates next generation behavior-based analysis technology to guard endpoints and servers and VMs against modern malware assaults such as ransomware and email phishing, which routinely get by legacy signature-based anti-virus tools. ProSight ASM protects local and cloud resources and provides a unified platform to manage the complete malware attack progression including protection, identification, mitigation, remediation, and post-attack forensics. Key capabilities include single-click rollback with Windows VSS and automatic network-wide immunization against new threats. Find out more about Progent's ProSight Active Security Monitoring endpoint protection and ransomware recovery.

  • ProSight Enhanced Security Protection (ESP): Endpoint Protection and Microsoft Exchange Email Filtering
    Progent's ProSight Enhanced Security Protection (ESP) managed services deliver affordable in-depth protection for physical servers and virtual machines, workstations, mobile devices, and Exchange email. ProSight ESP uses contextual security and advanced heuristics for continuously monitoring and responding to cyber threats from all vectors. ProSight ESP delivers firewall protection, penetration alarms, endpoint management, and web filtering via leading-edge tools incorporated within a single agent managed from a unified control. Progent's security and virtualization experts can assist your business to design and implement a ProSight ESP deployment that meets your company's unique requirements and that allows you demonstrate compliance with legal and industry information protection standards. Progent will help you specify and implement policies that ProSight ESP will enforce, and Progent will monitor your network and respond to alerts that call for immediate action. Progent can also assist you to install and verify a backup and restore system like ProSight Data Protection Services so you can get back in business quickly from a destructive cyber attack like ransomware. Read more about Progent's ProSight Enhanced Security Protection unified endpoint protection and Exchange email filtering.

  • ProSight Data Protection Services: Managed Backup and Recovery
    ProSight Data Protection Services provide small and mid-sized businesses a low cost and fully managed service for secure backup/disaster recovery (BDR). For a low monthly price, ProSight DPS automates and monitors your backup activities and enables fast recovery of critical data, applications and VMs that have become lost or corrupted as a result of hardware failures, software glitches, natural disasters, human error, or malware attacks like ransomware. ProSight Data Protection Services can help you back up, retrieve and restore files, folders, apps, system images, plus Microsoft Hyper-V and VMware images/. Important data can be protected on the cloud, to an on-promises device, or to both. Progent's BDR specialists can provide advanced support to set up ProSight DPS to be compliant with regulatory standards like HIPPA, FIRPA, PCI and Safe Harbor and, whenever needed, can help you to restore your 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 and email encryption service that incorporates the infrastructure of top information security companies to deliver web-based management and comprehensive protection for your email traffic. The powerful structure of Email Guard integrates a Cloud Protection Layer with an on-premises gateway appliance to offer advanced defense against spam, viruses, Dos Attacks, Directory Harvest Attacks (DHAs), and other email-borne malware. The cloud filter acts as a first line of defense and blocks most unwanted email from making it to your security perimeter. This decreases your vulnerability to inbound threats and conserves network bandwidth and storage. Email Guard's onsite security gateway device adds a deeper level of inspection for incoming email. For outgoing email, the onsite gateway provides anti-virus and anti-spam protection, protection against data leaks, and email encryption. The local security gateway can also help Microsoft Exchange Server to track and safeguard internal email traffic that originates and ends inside your security perimeter. For more information, visit ProSight Email Guard spam and content filtering.

  • ProSight WAN Watch: Network Infrastructure Remote Monitoring and Management
    ProSight WAN Watch is a network infrastructure monitoring and management service that makes it easy and affordable for small and mid-sized businesses to map out, track, optimize and troubleshoot their connectivity hardware such as switches, firewalls, and load balancers as well as servers, printers, endpoints and other devices. Using state-of-the-art RMM technology, WAN Watch ensures that network maps are always updated, captures and manages the configuration information of virtually all devices on your network, tracks performance, and generates notices when potential issues are detected. By automating time-consuming management processes, ProSight WAN Watch can knock hours off common tasks like making network diagrams, reconfiguring your network, locating devices that need critical software patches, or resolving performance problems. Learn more details about ProSight WAN Watch infrastructure monitoring and management consulting.

  • ProSight LAN Watch: Server and Desktop Monitoring
    ProSight LAN Watch is Progent’s server and desktop remote monitoring managed service that incorporates state-of-the-art remote monitoring and management technology to help keep your network running efficiently by checking the health of critical computers that power your information system. When ProSight LAN Watch uncovers a problem, an alarm is transmitted immediately to your designated IT management staff and your Progent consultant so all potential issues can be addressed before they can disrupt productivity Learn more about ProSight LAN Watch server and desktop remote monitoring consulting.

  • 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 secure fault tolerant data center on a fast virtual machine host set up and maintained by Progent's network support experts. Under the ProSight Virtual Hosting service model, the customer owns the data, the operating system platforms, and the apps. Because the system is virtualized, it can be ported immediately to an alternate hardware solution without a time-consuming and difficult reinstallation procedure. With ProSight Virtual Hosting, your business is not locked into a single hosting service. Find out more about ProSight Virtual Hosting services.

  • ProSight IT Asset Management: Infrastructure Documentation and Password Management
    ProSight IT Asset Management service is an IT infrastructure documentation management service that makes it easy to create, update, find and safeguard data about your IT infrastructure, procedures, applications, and services. You can quickly find passwords or serial numbers and be warned about impending expirations of SSL certificates or domains. By updating and organizing your network documentation, you can eliminate up to 50% of time spent trying to find critical information about your network. ProSight IT Asset Management features a centralized location for storing and collaborating on all documents required for managing your network infrastructure like recommended procedures and How-To's. ProSight IT Asset Management also supports a high level of automation for collecting and relating IT data. Whether you’re planning improvements, doing regular maintenance, or responding to a crisis, ProSight IT Asset Management gets you the knowledge you need the instant you need it. Find out more about ProSight IT Asset Management service.
ProSight Network Audits
Progent's ProSight Network Audits offer a quick and low-cost alternative for small and mid-size organizations to get an objective evaluation of the health of their network. Based on some of the leading remote monitoring and management (RMM) platforms available, and overseen by Progent's certified group of information technology professionals, ProSight Network Audits show you how closely the configuration of your essential network devices adhere to best practices. The Basic and Advanced options for ProSight Network Audit services are offered at a budget-friendly, one-time cost and deliver immediate benefits such as a cleaner Active Directory (AD) environment. Both also come with a year of advanced remote network monitoring and management. Benefits can include easier management, better compliance with data security regulations, higher utilization of IT assets, quicker problem resolution, more dependable backup and recovery, and higher availability. Read more about ProSight Network Audits IT infrastructure review.

Progent's ProSight Ransomware Preparedness Report
Progent's ProSight Ransomware Preparedness Report service is an affordable service built around a brief discussion with a Progent information assurance consultant. The fact-finding interview is designed to assess your company's ability to stop or recover rapidly following an assault by a ransomware variant like Ryuk, WannaCry, MongoLock, or Locky. Progent will consult with you personally to collect information about your existing antivirus tools and backup platform, and Progent will then deliver a written Basic Security and Best Practices Report document describing how you can follow best practices to create an efficient security and backup system that aligns with your business needs. For more information, visit Progent's ProSight Ransomware Preparedness Report.

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 details on our IT support offerings, refer to our Datasheets for IS Outsourcing and Network Monitoring Packages, available in PDF format 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: