Managed communications services
The SAS Group’s managed communications services offer one-stop network support and administration of your entire communications estate, including WANs, Internet circuits, public VPNs, private circuits, wireless networks, remote users, mobile workers and more. From our enterprise resource centre in the UK, we can remotely manage all of the voice and data infrastructure equipment and services at your premises, including all unified communications and other network convergence solutions.
The SAS team of communications specialists has the interdisciplinary knowledge of voice technology, data networks and server environments, vital to supporting unified communications. We’re also rich in both legacy and future communications knowledge, ensuring our managed communications services can take you from where you are today to where you want to go.
SAS managed communications services are part of our complete managed services portfolio, and are available as a standalone solution or in combination with features of our managed network and managed support services.
Service features
SAS discovery and documentation helps you create an inventory of all communication assets within your infrastructure, including any accrued through mergers or acquisitions. As part of our managed communications service, we provide a schematic listing every circuit you own and detailing its purpose, users and utilisation levels, as well as providing comprehensive information on billing and circuit redundancy. We can also help you consolidate your communication requirements to produce a master service agreement.
SAS communications audits analyse your network's performance, bandwidth utilisation, configuration, quality of service (QoS) and security levels to provide essential intelligence for management, support and documentation, as well as network and application planning. Our services cover LANs, WLANs, WANs, public and private VPNs, remote access, mobile and home worker solutions.
SAS technical design authority (TDA) enables you to scope and construct the optimum converged network to support your business infrastructure. Our service delivers business requirements specification, technical architecture review, infrastructure design, and carrier and vendor selection. Our comprehensive TDA audit identifies any interdependencies existing between your current and proposed network infrastructure, and our in-house design technicians will specify the interfaces, configurations and routing protocols essential for the final solution.
SAS mean opinion score testing (MOS) provides a numeric assessment of the quality of speech that is available across every segment of your network. Our testing methodology ensures that each device along your intended, or current, voice path can be optimally configured to prioritise voice traffic across the network. Continuous monitoring, from our UK-based NOC, guarantees that any moves, adds or changes that could negatively impact the quality of voice service are highlighted and notified as soon as they happen. It also enables tracking and analysis of any historic events that affected network performance to prevent recurrence.
SAS carrier management is a complete procurement, administration and support service for your single or multi-country WAN installation. We provide a range of voice, data and mobile provisioning services covering technical specification, product selection and configuration, and including one-bill invoicing to help you consolidate the management of multiple carrier services.
SAS communications network monitoring is an interactive surveillance service for proactively assessing the performance and availability of your network components. We can provide additional cover for intrusion detection, email and web content filtering, firewall scanning, change management, testing and availability analysis. We can also supply fully managed services for incident handling, including comprehensive reporting tools for network analysis.
SAS communications support provides you with independent fault resolution and incident management services across LANs, WLANs, WANs, public and private VPNs, PSTN, ISDN2 and ISDN30 lines, remote access, mobile and home worker solutions. Our network support service covers short-term replacement of hardware equipment and components, and includes fixed-price four, eight and twenty-four hour service level agreements. We can also include integrated carrier and ISP monitoring and fault resolution as part of this service.
Delivery specifications
SAS discovery and documentation
- Analysis of all current carrier bills and support agreements
- Identification and analysis of all current physical infrastructure components, including purpose, users and utilisation levels
- Identification and documentation of redundant circuits
- Comparison of current billed assets against infrastructure assets
- Documentation of communications estate
- Master service agreement preparation
SAS communications audits
- Analysis of network documentation and physical locations of connected devices and equipment
- Analysis of written policies and procedures against actual network connections
- Analysis of corporate compliance with policies and procedures
- Analysis of network design, configuration, patch and firmware levels
- Benchmarking of network traffic throughput for transmission levels, bandwidth utilisation, QoS, speed and best practice installation
- Review of network device configurations to identify performance and security levels
- Analysis of infrastructure capacity limits
- ISO compliance checking
- Test plan development and project management
- Implementation of external, internal, mobile, physical and social engineering security penetration tests
- Interpretation of test results and recommendations for remedial requirements
- Security policy and procedure development
SAS technical design authority (TDA)
- Identification and analysis of all current physical infrastructure components and configurations, including LAN, WAN, telephony, video and mobile devices
- Documentation of communications estate
- Business requirements analysis and specification
- Documentation of project scope
- Creation of statement of requirement (SOR)
- Design and agreement of global architecture and technology standards
- Review and presentation of solution architecture options
- Product specification
- Carrier review and selection
- Project management from concept to final solution design
- Design and documentation of in-life support model
SAS mean opinion score testing (MOS)
- Analysis of EF and AF network traffic
- Simulation and modeling of voice traffic
- Generation of baseline statistics for MOS
- Identification of deficient device configurations
- Continuous MOS testing and event reporting
- Network load balancing
- Adverse event analysis and trending
- Final solution design MOS acceptance testing
SAS carrier management
- Provisioning and management of UK and international carrier networks
- Management of single links, multi-site WANs and global infrastructures
- Project management for installations, moves, adds and changes of voice and data services
- Carrier integration services for network design and implementation
- Migration planning and support for carrier changes and upgrades
- Cost benchmarking against prevailing tariffs, special offers or consolidated spend discounts
- Single point of contact in single or multiple carrier relationships for faults, billing and level 1 support
- RFP development and management for UK and international voice and data services
- Acceptance testing and soak testing of installed networks to ensure network specification required has been delivered
- New carrier systems documentation
SAS communications network monitoring
- Analysis and documentation of network infrastructure
- Analysis of SLAs and supplier contracts and metrics against actual network performance and security levels
- Custom analysis of priority systems and intervals for monitoring
- Proactive monitoring of LAN, WAN and wireless LAN hardware (switches, routers, servers, firewalls and associated traffic levels, throughput performance and applications) via realtime IP links to the SAS NOC
- Proactive monitoring of QoS/CoS parameters, including jitter, delay and packet loss
- Production of MoS reports by device and network segment
- Client access to ITIL compliant real-time online reporting and statistical monitoring
- Implementation of SNMP traps and other real-time and manual monitoring tools
- Development of incident handling and reporting procedures
- Management and implementation of contingency plans and diagnostics
- Analysis and reporting on security, performance and availability indicators and trends
SAS communications support
- Onsite, telephone and remote-access support
- Independent fixed and mobile infrastructure and carrier diagnostics service (multiple carriers, networks and circuits)
- Independent SLA monitoring and fault diagnosis (single or multiple ISPs)
- Central management of ISP/Telco support issues
- Benchmarking availability, performance and utilisation of key domain environments (hardware, software, applications, network and connectivity)
- 24/7 performance and availability monitoring of all communications hardware and traffic
- 24/7 monitoring of key domain environments
- 24/7 monitoring and trending of system availability and bandwidth
- Management of external DNS information
- Fixed price 4, 8 and 24 hour service level agreements for hardware and software support
- Software support for level 1 and 2 queries
- SLGs for replacement of hardware equipment and components
- Network troubleshooting and incident management, including fail-over routing for disaster recovery, and logging and notification of all critical router events
- Automated collection and checking of system configuration scripts
- Dedicated administrator for each customer account
- One bill and one point of contact for all customer support requirements
- Administrator and end-user training
The SAS Group’s managed communications services are provided by our team of dedicated network services consultants from our West Sussex headquarters, near London in the South East.