Challenges of Supporting a Remote Workforce Underscore Value of Maintenance Partners

Park Place Hardware Maintenance


Case Allin October 13, 2020

The COVID-19 pandemic has challenged IT operations in various ways, from limiting the availability of on-site staff to supporting an often sudden transition to a work-from-home model. It’s been an unfortunate reminder of how vital it is to have access to top-quality expertise.

For example, one friend at an investment firm reported a very odd networking problem. Some colleagues were experiencing difficulties accessing the central business system. As the IT staff dug in, they found no issues when users relied on an Ethernet cable to connect to the company-supplied router at their house. But some employees who used WiFi on the same router model got error messages—but it turned out the brand of laptop they had been issued mattered.

Anyone in IT can sympathize with the struggle to diagnose such a seemingly impossible scenario. Multiple staff members tried to solve it before calling for outside help. Ultimately, it was revealed that the legacy financial services application was using an outdated networking protocol, and a configuration adjustment was needed to accommodate.

Suffering days’ worth of lost employee productivity is a hard way to learn the value of having top-notch engineers on speed dial, as well as the right support resources organized in advance. This is where third party maintenance can be a significant asset, backing up internal IT teams when they need it most.

For example, with networking, storage, and server support from Park Place Technologies, clients enjoy:

  • More smart hands on the bench. Park Place’s “follow the sun” global customer service center provides immediate access to experienced engineers who know the ins and outs the covered hardware, so clients can have their questions answered anytime, anywhere around the world. It’s a big factor in driving better Uptime, and the importance only increases in a rapidly evolving situation like a public health crisis.
  • Fewer site visits. Park Place offers ParkView automated hardware monitoring to keep watch over your installed systems, so you don’t have to. This not only reduces the daily checklist for personnel working in the data center, it makes for fewer trips to remote locations to determine systems’ status. Clients save time and money day-to-day, as well as ensure effective hardware oversight when travel restrictions, quarantines, or other barriers come into play.
  • Reliable spare parts access. It’s expensive and time-consuming to stock and maintain a parts repository. This management headache is one of the primary reasons IT departments tend to avoid DIY hardware support whenever possible, and Park Place is happy to take on the responsibility. Simply select the SLAs that best meet your needs, and the break/fix process is a cinch. ParkView alerts our team to the event and provides parts numbers and other details. Then an engineer is dispatched, spares in hand, to implement the solution. That’s it.

Park Place is proud of the role we played in helping our clients prevent unexpected downtime at a most difficult time, and we’d love the opportunity to discuss the specific ways our discovery, monitoring, support, and optimization (DMSO) solutions can contribute to your IT resilience. Just contact us.

We’ve even developed a whitepaper documenting other steps IT organizations are taking to upgrade and improve their business continuity preparations. From the New Normal to the Next Normal for Digital Infrastructure: Data Center Monitoring & Maintenance Strategies to Enhance Resilience is available for download here.

About the Author

Case Allin, Senior Director of Sales, ParkView & Entuity