Computer Outsourcing for Midsize Companies

Progent's Shared Help Desk Service
Progent's Co-managed Help Desk service is designed for organizations with between 50 and 500 end users and allows your information technology team to split activity for Help Desk services seamlessly between your internal support team and Progent's extensive roster of IT service engineers and subject matter experts. Progent's Co-managed Service Desk is a joint IT support solution built around ConnectWise Manage, the industry-leading Professional Services Automation (PSA) tool for administering IT support requests, generating trouble tickets, assigning responsibility, tracking status, and producing management analytics. The cost for Level 1 IT support for Progent's Co-managed Help Desk service averages less than $18 per user per month.

Progent's Co-managed Help Desk Service provides a seamless extension of your corporate network support staff. End user access to the Service Desk, provision of support, problem escalation, trouble ticket creation and updates, performance measurement, and management of the service database are cohesive whether incidents are taken care of by your internal network support organization, by Progent's team, or both. All end-user service requests are ranked as Level 1, 2 or 3 issues. Progent takes responsibility for whatever service level or levels you assign (usually Levels 1 and 3). Original support requests are routed either to your in-house IT support group or to Progent's Technical Response Center (TRC), based on your instructions. Level 2 or 3 issues can be referred to Progent's Experts Team of subject matter experts (SMEs). The escalation activity is transparent to your end users. Your business has unrestricted flexibility to extend or shrink your share of IT support work as required. Progent takes care of startup deployment and provisioning of the professional services PSA software plus workflow documentation, testing and training.

Progent's Technical Response Center (TRC)
Progent's Technical Response Center (TRC) has been delivering remote technical support for over twenty years and has active customers in every state in the country (refer to Progent's customer testimonials.) The TRC maintains the pool of certified desktop technicians who can resolve Level 1 trouble tickets, which represent the bulk of Service Desk support requests. The TRC, like Progent's Experts Team, uses the ConnectWise Manage professional services automation software platform to automate ticketing, status tracking, ownership delegation, problem escalation and management reporting. This keeps problems from being ignored and gives clients clear visibility of all support services delivered. The TRC targets 90% in-person answer rate and allows Progent's Co-managed Service Desk program to offer a 60-minute service-level agreement (SLA). Service times are 5am to 7pm Pacific Time on standard business days. Extended support hours and onsite help are offered at additional cost. For more details about the TRC, refer to Progent's TRC Customer Commitment.

Definition of Service Levels
Progent offers three levels of remote IT support, which are equivalent to industry-standard Tier 1 through Tier 3 support. You can select which service levels will be provided wholly or shared by Progent's support team and your in-house staff. The size and scope of Progent's roster of subject matter experts (SMEs) allows rapid and efficient ticket escalation and permits you to count on Progent as a one-stop source for the majority of IT problems at any service level. In addition, Progent's practice of knowledge transfer allows important service issues to move from higher to lower Tiers as resolution workflows become documented and normalized so they can be handled by less skilled and less expensive support personnel.

Support levels are defined as:

• Level 1 Support: Filters Help Desk requests and delivers baseline IT support and debugging, like password resets, printer set up, break/fix procedures, ticket assignment and promotion to Level 2 and Level 3 support. A Level 1 tech gathers and analyzes information about the user's issue and determines the best way to resolve the problem. Level 1 support may also provide assistance for familiar Level 2 or 3 problems where solutions have already been documented.
• Level 2 Support: Primarily addresses break/fix, configuration problems, debugging, application or OS installations, and hardware fixes such as in-house fixes or orchestrating depot services. This Level deals with escalated issues that Level 1 personnel are not equipped to handle. Level 2 will sometimes migrate to Level 3, based on the issue and the manner the Help Desk operates.
• Level 3 Support: Troubleshooting, setup, database administration, and repair for server, cloud integration, messaging, collaboration, and various infrastructure issues. In addition to possessing the ability to find fixes to novel issues, a Level 3 consultant usually has the most expertise.

This particular deployment of Progent's Co-managed Help Desk Service has a 4-phase ticket lifecycle:

1. Your employees generate requests through the online support, a dedicated phone number, or simply by sending a message to a specific email address. This immediately launches an open request in the trouble ticket system.
2. Progent's Technical Response Center receives the open request and determines if it will be handles or forwarded to your in-house Help Desk.
3. Your Help Desk gets the escalated ticket request and decides the appropriate method to service the issue. If necessary, your Service Desk can escalate the ticket request back to Progent for resolution by Progent's Experts Team.
4. Progent receives the updated ticket request, identifies the best suited subject matter exert from the Experts Team, and assigns the chosen SME to work with your IT team until the problem is solved or closed.

Key Features of Progent's Service Desk
Top features of Progent's Co-managed Service Desk program are:

• Pooled desktop help from Progent's Technical Response Center team
• Desktop remote support provided 5 days a week, 5am-7pm PST, 60 Minute SLA
• Discounted hourly rate and per-minute granularity for Tier 1 desktop support for clients
• Typical price of Level 1 service is about $18 per user monthly
• Level 2 and Level 3 help from Progent SME available on request at Progent's standard consulting rates
• De-escalation allows issues that initially call for Level 2 or 3 expertise to move to a lower, less expensive Tier after procedures are documented
• StreamlineIT includes a full version of ConnectWise Manage PSA software with secure multitenancy

• Offered only in the United States and US territories
• Initial startup charge dependent on complexity of the deployment
• Starting day one, Progent assigns you a Technical Resource Center (TRC) Coordinator and a TRC Service Lead to resource, appoint and communicate with your team and your users. Progent's TRC Service Lead will work closely with you to develop a What Goes Where document to help seamlessly escalate issues to your service group or de-escalate back to Progent's team of engineers.
• Live Answer of incoming service requests to Progent Technical Response Center with a goal of 90% Live Answer of all requests
• After determining if server or networking support is required, some calls will be passed to Level 2 or 3 support
• All support requiring Level 2 or Level 3 service will be worked on by a Progent expert pending your authorization
• 1 hour SLA for Level 1 desktop support in most cases
• Level 1 Service is for end users and applies to Windows-powered systems and Apple devices
• Progent Level 2 or 3 support will be provided at standard hourly consulting prices
• Progent will provide resources - Technical Response Center desktop specialists daily, Level 2 and 3 as needed
• Progent will dedicate a toll-free phone number and email mailbox for inbound support requests
• Free Remote Control software with screen sharing for efficient technical troubleshooting
• Free ProSight IT Asset Management system for IT documentation management
• All Level 1 remote service is charged at a special hourly rate with one-minute granularity
• All Level 1 service is done online, no onsite work included
• All on-premises support is billed at regular hourly consulting rates
• All on-premises work will have an added fixed charge plus any specific travel costs
• All travel expense estimates will be disclosed and require customer approval before support services or travel will be performed
• Projects and separate Statements of Work (SoWs) will have their own estimates and fees outlined and will be performed only after approval by client

Initial Phase

• Build your custom Service Desk environment, including your in-house support group, service locations, and user information
• Progent's consultants will work closely with your service team to review current incoming service requests
• Set up your inbound support request service to include email, software agents, and a dedicated phone number

• Progent delivers trouble ticket management education for your company's support group
• Jointly create basic workflow and ticket escalation procedures
• Integrate all your groups and assets that will deliver IT support
• Develop the roll-out message and selling of the new Help Desk solution
• Designate a defined location or manageably-sized clusters of users to onboard initially
• Integrate additional users into the system at determined intervals

• Review reports and system configuration for efficient data and processes
• Create additional reports or fields needed to improve the detection or tracking of common issues
• Identify key data that could allow a higher resolution rate for Level 1 support requests

• All users have been exposed to the service desk and can access it
• All necessary client and equipment information is populated in the support system
• You are able to transfer and manage trouble tickets transparently between your in-house team and Progent
• You are able to monitor daily, weekly and monthly support performance and trends

• Retain complete control of your IT support requests: you choose what tickets are escalated to Progent's support desk or taken care of by your internal support staff.
• Rapid availability of additional IT support experts when and if you require them: Progent's professional services automation (PSA) software automatically routes internal trouble tickets or permits you manually escalate to Progent's Technical Response Center.
• Productivity: Progent's team will analyze your current incoming service requests and propose missing data that would promote a higher resolution rate for common desktop requests. Progent's IT support experts can also help you with tag creation to expedite problem resolution.
• Seamlessness: Progent's Co-managed Help Desk is a seamless extension of your in-house Call Center with centralized ticketing and reporting so no ticket falls through the cracks.
• Contented workers: End users have the ability to follow the progress of their IT support calls rapidly and easily.
• Management analytics: You benefit from the measurements, accountability, and activity reporting of a modern PSA system to assist your organization to create a custom Call Center environment that provides top business value.
• Concentrate on your strategic business issues, not IT service requests and disgruntled workers: Your IT management personnel escape being bogged down handling ordinary service requests.

Read Progent's White Paper: Is Co-managed IT a Good Idea?
Even though supporting your own self-sufficient internal IT staff can be expensive from the cost standpoint, a lot of businesses prefer that strategy since it gives more flexibility with their IT management. Yet did you realize that your business can continue to reap the advantages of a managed IT services provider within the co-managed IT support model. Adopting the shared model allows your company to keep in control over your system infrastructure while supplementing your internal network support staff simply and economically.

For details, see our white paper: Is co-managed IT a good idea? (PDF - 632 KB).

Download Progent's Shared Help Desk Datasheet
To view a single-page datasheet in PDF format describing Progent's Shared Service Desk, see:
Progent's Shared Service Desk Datasheet. (PDF - 108 KB)

Progent's ProSight Line of RMM Services
Progent has packaged the ProSight family of remote monitoring and management (RMM) services to streamline critical activities associated with IT management, cybersecurity and maintenance. Any of these RMM services can be integrated with Progent's Shared Help Desk service by installing agent software on computers to be monitored and managed. Notifications sent by these software agents can be routed directly to Progent's Technical Response Center (TRC), processed via the trouble ticket and monitoring platform, and categorized for Level 1, 2 or 3 treatment.

Examples of ProSight Remote Monitoring and Management services include:

• ProSight LAN Watch: Network, Server, and Endpoint Remote Monitoring Services
  ProSight LAN Watch is Progent's network, server, and endpoint remote monitoring managed service that incorporates state-of-the-art remote monitoring and management (RMM) technology to keep your IT system running efficiently by checking the health of vital assets that drive your information system. When ProSight LAN Watch uncovers a problem, an alert is sent immediately to your designated IT management personnel and your Progent engineering consultant so any potential problems can be resolved before they can disrupt your network. ProSight LAN Watch is National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) compliant. Find out more details about ProSight LAN Watch network, server, and endpoint remote monitoring services.

• ProSight LAN Watch with NinjaOne RMM: Centralized RMM Solution for Networks, Servers, and Workstations
  ProSight LAN Watch with NinjaOne RMM software delivers a centralized, cloud-driven solution for monitoring and managing your client-server infrastructure by providing an environment for performing common time-consuming jobs. These include health checking, patch management, automated repairs, endpoint deployment, backup and recovery, A/V response, secure remote access, built-in and custom scripts, resource inventory, endpoint status reports, and troubleshooting support. If ProSight LAN Watch with NinjaOne RMM uncovers a serious incident, it transmits an alert to your designated IT management staff and your assigned Progent consultant so emerging issues can be taken care of before they interfere with your network. Find out more details about ProSight LAN Watch with NinjaOne RMM server and desktop monitoring consulting.

• ProSight WAN Watch: Network Infrastructure Remote Monitoring and Management
  Progent's ProSight WAN Watch is a network infrastructure management service that makes it simple and affordable for small and mid-sized businesses to diagram, track, optimize and troubleshoot their connectivity appliances such as routers, firewalls, and wireless controllers as well as servers, printers, client computers and other networked devices. Incorporating state-of-the-art RMM technology, ProSight WAN Watch ensures that network diagrams are always updated, captures and manages the configuration information of virtually all devices connected to your network, monitors performance, and generates alerts when issues are discovered. By automating complex network management activities, ProSight WAN Watch can knock hours off common chores like network mapping, expanding your network, finding appliances that require critical updates, or resolving performance bottlenecks. Learn more about ProSight WAN Watch network infrastructure management services.

• ProSight Reporting: Real-time Reporting for Ticketing and Network Monitoring Platforms
  ProSight Reporting is an expanding line of real-time and in-depth management reporting plug-ins created to work with the industry's top ticketing and network monitoring programs including ConnectWise Manage, ConnectWise Automate, Customer Thermometer, Auvik, and SentinelOne. ProSight Reporting incorporates Microsoft Graph and features color coding to surface and contextualize critical issues such as spotty support follow-up or endpoints with missing patches. By exposing ticketing or network health concerns clearly and in near-real time, ProSight Reporting improves network value, lowers management overhead, and saves money. For more information, see ProSight Reporting for ticketing and network monitoring applications.

• ProSight Data Protection Services (DPS): Managed Backup and Recovery
  Progent has partnered with advanced backup/restore product companies to create ProSight Data Protection Services, a family of management offerings that provide backup-as-a-service (BaaS). ProSight DPS products automate and monitor your data backup operations and enable non-disruptive backup and fast recovery of vital files, apps, system images, and Hyper-V and VMware virtual machines. ProSight DPS helps you avoid data loss caused by equipment failures, natural calamities, fire, malware such as ransomware, user error, ill-intentioned insiders, or software bugs. Managed services in the ProSight Data Protection Services selection include ProSight Altaro VM Backup, ProSight 365 Total Backup (formerly Altaro Office 365 Backup, ProSight ECHO Backup based on Barracuda purpose-built hardware, and ProSight MSP360 Cloud and On-prem Backup. Your Progent service representative can help you to identify which of these managed services are most appropriate for your network.

• 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 technology of leading information security vendors to deliver web-based control and comprehensive security for your email traffic. The powerful architecture of Progent's Email Guard combines a Cloud Protection Layer with an on-premises security gateway appliance to provide advanced defense against spam, viruses, Dos Attacks, DHAs, and other email-based threats. Email Guard's Cloud Protection Layer acts as a preliminary barricade and blocks most unwanted email from reaching your network firewall. This reduces your vulnerability to external threats and conserves system bandwidth and storage space. Email Guard's on-premises security gateway device adds a deeper layer of inspection for incoming email. For outbound email, the onsite gateway provides AV and anti-spam filtering, policy-based Data Loss Prevention, and email encryption. The on-premises security gateway can also assist Exchange Server to track and safeguard internal email traffic that originates and ends within your security perimeter. For more details, visit Email Guard spam filtering and data leakage protection.

• ProSight MFA with Duo: ID Confirmation, Endpoint Policy Enforcement, and Secure Single Sign-on (SSO)
  Progent's Duo MFA service plans utilize Cisco's Duo technology to protect against password theft through the use of two-factor authentication. Duo supports single-tap identity verification with Apple iOS, Google Android, and other out-of-band devices. Using 2FA, whenever you sign into a secured online account and give your password you are asked to verify who you are via a device that only you possess and that uses a different ("out-of-band") network channel. A wide range of devices can be utilized for this second form of authentication such as a smartphone or watch, a hardware/software token, a landline phone, etc. You can designate several verification devices. To find out more about ProSight Duo two-factor identity authentication services, visit Duo MFA two-factor authentication services for access security.

• ProSight Co-Managed Help Desk: Outsourced and Co-managed IT Support Center Services
  Progent's Co-managed Help Desk Service provides a seamless supplement to your corporate support staff. User access to the Help Desk, delivery of support, problem escalation, ticket generation and tracking, performance measurement, and maintenance of the support database are cohesive regardless of whether incidents are resolved by your corporate network support group, by Progent, or a mix of the two. Your business has unrestricted flexibility to extend or shrink your share of support activity as circumstances demand. Progent takes care of initial installation and onboarding of the professional services automation software as well as documentation, testing and education. For details about ProSight Shared Help Desk, visit ProSight Shared Support.

• ProSight Active Security Monitoring (ASM): Behavior-based Threat Analysis and Ransomware Protection:
  Progent's ProSight Active Security Monitoring is an endpoint protection service that utilizes cutting edge behavior-based machine learning technology from SentinelOne to guard physical and virtual endpoints against new malware attacks like ransomware and file-less exploits, which easily escape traditional signature-based AV products. ProSight ASM protects on-premises and cloud-based resources and offers a single platform to manage the entire malware attack lifecycle including blocking, detection, mitigation, remediation, and forensics. Top capabilities include single-click rollback using Windows VSS and automatic system-wide immunization against newly discovered attacks. Progent is a SentinelOne Partner, dealer, and integrator. Read more about Progent's ProSight Active Security Monitoring next-generation endpoint protection and ransomware defense with SentinelOne technology.

• Progent's Patch Management: Software/Firmware Update Management Services:
  Progent's managed services for software and firmware patch management offer organizations of any size a flexible and cost-effective solution for evaluating, testing, scheduling, applying, and documenting updates to your dynamic IT network. In addition to maximizing the protection and reliability of your IT network, Progent's software/firmware update management services permit your in-house IT staff to concentrate on more strategic initiatives and tasks that deliver the highest business value from your information network. Read more about Progent's patch management support services.