We advise clients on the best practices to improve the quality and cost-effectiveness of their IT investments as well as helping clients to manage their communications, data and management information systems more effectively.
We believe in regular IT audits and reviews so that we can offer the best advice on IT strategy and policies that are aligned with your commercial and business objectives. As your business grows we need to work with you to enhance these strategies to identify how technology can improve business performance.
We can project manage tailor made solutions from Microsoft Small Business Server (SBS) to full virtualisation, high availability and hosted/cloud based systems.
Businesses have to evolve to remain competitive and efficient. We can help you embrace new technology to become more flexible and efficient for example integrating a VoIP telephone system, mobile communications and remote working solutions.
Company data is generally regarded as a company’s most valuable asset. We can advise and install network security systems as well as online backup and business recovery services.
We see our role as your IT experts or outsourced IT department where we keep abreast of new technologies to assist you on IT investment decisions, helping you budget and plan for the future with confidence.
Whether you are a new start up business, merging business, or an expanding business we can project manage and install a solutions for you. We are well versed in providing services to clients and can add valued input at the planning stage.
We have been selected on a number of occasions to project manage and implement a new computer network from scratch. This has entailed bringing together other partners to provide services such as specialist software and network cabling.
We can also provide a “network in a box” service where all the equipment is delivered to us. We set it up and configure the computer network including the file structure, user names and logon details and peripheral equipment such as printers. The computer system is then delivered to the client’s site where we unbox and connect the equipment together, test and it is quickly ready for use.
In a similar fashion we have replaced a client multi-site core server infrastructure with the minimum of downtime. The servers were configured for use at our premises and later installed in parallel at the clients offices. The switch over was planned with the minimum of user disruption.
Other solutions we have provided for clients include: High Availability and Disaster Recovery solutions; real-time replication and Distributed File Service; load-balancing and server redundancy, email failover and clustering technologies; online backup and hosted VoIP telephone solutions.
Where clients wish to locate infrastructure off site, Alliance Solutions has its own server hosting facilities at a co-location site offering a highly available networking framework to reliably host clients’ infrastructure.
We have our own server rack at a secure co-location site in Milton Keynes, which was chosen due to its location and considered to be a lower risk location than Tele House in Docklands area of London. The co-location site is 45 minutes from our office and we have 24 hour access.
We host a number of client office and Disaster Recovery servers, VoIP telephone system equipment and a number of our own servers including our on-line backup server.
The broadband connections to the co-location site are high speed fibre providing very fast connections. A couple of our clients have chosen to have their main office server hosted in our rack.
The majority of the servers we host are utilising server virtualisation, which is an efficient use of space and resources. Virtualisation enables one physical server do the job of multiple computers, by sharing the resources of a single computer across multiple environments.
By utilising virtual server technology e.g. Microsoft’s HyperV or VMWare, the number of physical servers can be greatly reduced as virtual servers are consolidated on to less physical hardware. This result in lower hardware cost and less physical space required see Virtualisation.
We are authorised to offer and provide a hosted “pay as you go” virtual server for smaller clients. This is popular with clients that don’t have an office or are in serviced offices and they don’t want the upfront cost of purchasing their own server and server software. A number of software vendors e.g. Microsoft now offer Software as a Service (SaaS) amongst other cloud based solutions.
Alliance Solutions offers a full range of network support services that are designed to ensure that your network runs smoothly and efficiently with the minimum of down time.
We set ourselves a target for network up-time for our client’s networks of a minimum of 99.9% over a 12 month period. We have achieved this target for 93% of our customers each year for the last three years. This figure excludes Internet outages which are beyond our control or scheduled downtime during major network upgrades.
We achieve these reliability figures by using pro-active network monitoring and regular scheduled managed service day site visits when we carry out preventative maintenance work.
Most support services are reactive. By the time any action is taken the customer is already experiencing problems, costing both time and money. Some support companies only offer reactive support.
Alliance Solutions also offers reactive support since it is an essential element of any support service. However, we spend a significant amount of time on preventative maintenance which substantially reduces the number of reactive support incidents. This saves your organisation time and money.
Alliance Solutions offers three month standard support contracts. You do not need to commit to or pay for a whole year’s support at a time. This also keeps us on our toes because any customer could cancel at almost any time if we do not do a good job!