IT to Business Alignment - Executive Coaching
Expertise in IT Governance, Best Practice augmented by over 20 years of industry experience.
Offers you access to enterprise level resources:
- Unlimited Service Calls
- 24x7 Systems Monitoring and Alerting
- Vendor Management
We can advise on IT strategy and policies, as well as helping you to manage data and management information more effectively. We have particular experience of IT audits and reviews, carried out with a view to improving the quality and cost-effectiveness of your IT investments.
And, of course, we design, install, support and maintain our clients' highly varied infrastructures - integrating telephony solutions, if appropriate.
Also core to our business is one-to-one high quality support for individual users delivered remotely and face-to-face. We can also help your people to work more flexibly and more effectively via our remote working solutions.
Finally, we have a long-standing track-record in delivery of security services and back-up & business recovery services.
More information is available on all of the above. Just select a service area from the menu on the left.
The B&A Consultants brings together experts in business planning and IT strategy, helping clients to achieve IT to Business alignment and maximize the value of ongoing technology investments.
As your business grows and evolves, your IT strategy must evolve with it. At B&A, our strategic and technical consultants work with clients to identify opportunities for improvement, to plan for the future and to manage change. We help senior decision-makers to identify how technology can improve business performance, ensuring that IT strategies are aligned with commercial and business objectives.
We advise on IT investment decisions, helping busy clients to budget and plan for the future with confidence. Typical organizational challenges we assist with are:
- Advising on integration challenges related to a merger
- Assisting clients best organize the IT Operations according to industry best practice
- Helping organizations to increase efficiency via enhanced productivity and reduced costs
In short, B&A it Enables Your Business™ we help our clients to get the most out of their IT investment, so that your systems add tangible business value and increase the return on investment.
B&A takes a rigorous approach to infrastructure audits, analyzing strengths, weaknesses and opportunities for future improvements.
Our experience of managing literally hundreds of differently configured IT environments means that we are well placed to understand how best to configure infrastructure for an individual client seeking our advice.
Our consultants and senior engineers are well qualified to benchmark your IT environment against industry best practice and emerging technology opportunities.
The core aim of a B&A infrastructure audit is to provide a report and set of recommendations outlining the current position, identifying shortfalls and risks, and suggesting future improvements.
We also understand that benchmarking against the “ideal” is only useful up to a point. As business pragmatists, we recognize that useful recommendations must also consider cost (and return on investment) in addition to technical specification and performance.
Infrastructure Design and Implementation
B&A works in close partnership with clients to design an IT infrastructure that is
specific to their organization and their evolving needs.
Whether you are setting up
a new IT infrastructure, replacing an ageing network or expanding network capacity,
you can rely on B&A to provide the design and delivery skills required to partner
you from initial briefing through to final handover.
We have experience of installing and managing literally hundreds of differently configured IT environments for a wide range of clients in different sectors, and at different stages of business maturity. Above all, we understand that there is a balance to be struck between leveraging investment in existing infrastructure and new investment in an optimal solution.
Our focus is on the creation of a robust, scalable, flexible environment upon which business applications and solutions can be built cost effectively. The right network will neatly mirror your business and its operational requirements. The right solution is as individual as your business and your brand. Defining, designing and delivering such individualized solutions is a core B&A skill.
Infrastructure Support and Maintenance
B&A has the people and the technology to ensure that your core infrastructure remains an asset you can rely on to deliver business value. Your IT infrastructure is the framework that allows your organization to function.
Whether your business is spread across multiple sites, or concentrated in a single area of activity, in today's technology dependent economy, very little business can be transacted if your IT infrastructure fails.
As the old proverb says; “a chain is only as strong as its weakest link”. If one key component in your network fails, there is no network, however well maintained and resilient other components may be. B&A understands these crucial business truths.
A combination of The B&A platform and expertly qualified B&A people ensures that clients' infrastructure problems are pre-empted and/or resolved as quickly as possible, minimizing any impact on business and profitability. “B&A is in business to keep you in business.”
B&A's Service Desk is designed around the needs of clients and their individual users. Our engineers, backed by the power of The B&A platform, deliver exceptional responsiveness and accountability.
We employ technologies allowing us to remotely share the desktop with your end users providing efficient and timely support. This method allows us to drastically reduce the response time as well as the time to resolution translating in less downtime and increased productivity.
If occasional local support is required we can be on site in a matter of hours. In cases where dedicated on-site support is desired we can assign full time resources to your locations.
We dedicate exceptional amounts of effort into recruiting talented, motivated problem-solvers, who genuinely enjoy human interaction. B&A support engineers are all technical experts, able to resolve IT problems swiftly.
But, equally importantly, we recruit to ensure that they also have exceptional interpersonal skills. These high quality people are then supported with market leading support systems, and work within a culture where success is always measured in terms of client satisfaction, and where constant self-improvement is the norm.
Client feedback directly impacts on B&A engineers' performance reviews, providing them with an additional reason to meet and exceed needs and expectations.
B&A has the expertise and the track-record to help clients to protect their networks and data from both external and internal security threats.
Information security has never been as important as it is today. With hacking tools now widely available, businesses need to take every precaution to protect themselves from external as well as internal threats.
B&A is an IT partner that you can trust to deal with such crucial concerns on your behalf. We have over ten years experience of defining and implementing IT security policies, and are familiar with the types of security issues faced by small and medium-sized businesses.
Specifying security solutions and policies requires expert input. As systems become increasingly interconnected, there are more potential threats to IT networks and critical business data. The irony is that as we provide better access for employees (to work remotely; for example), we also create the need for more sophisticated security solutions, systems and policies.
In parallel, it is getting easier for employees to copy and remove sensitive data - online or via simple USB drives and similar, highly portable media. Our in-depth experience ensures that we understand the evolving nature of such threats, and - more importantly - that we understand how best to protect clients from new threats as they arise.
Is your business encouraging telecommuting? Extending the network beyond the office, while ensuring optimal network security, is a core B&A skill.
With B&A's help, your team could be working effectively and productively, regardless of their location. Whether they require access to voice services, e-mail, their office desktop or your company extranet, we can design solutions that are cost effective, secure and reliable.
At B&A, we deliver most of the leading remote working solutions available. By linking the right devices to well proven systems, we deliver a high quality “in-office” experience for those who are out of the office for large parts of their working day. By connecting mobile employees to valuable data and applications, our solutions improve their productivity and effectiveness across the entire working day…
Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery
B&A provides an automated, agent-less, secure, fast, simple and scalable redundant backup solution. We also advise clients on disaster recovery and planning, ensuring that business can continue in the event of the unexpected...
To ensure that your business can deal with the unforeseen, it is crucial to ensure that key data is being properly managed and secured. Traditional solutions, involving tape or data storing across multiple sites are available from B&A, where appropriate.
But online backup provides a solution that is less time-consuming and easier to manage for most small and medium-sized businesses (further detail regarding backup service is available separately).
Backing up critical data is a key component of any disaster recovery plan. In the
event of a fire, a flood or some other unforeseen event, you'll need to know – in
advance – that you can still access up to date information as soon as possible.
The
B&A team of advisers helps clients to plan comprehensively for such possibilities.
We review your network architecture, the applications you are running, and your user activity to ensure that plans are in place to replicate what is required to keep your business running, should the worst happen.
Virtualization lets one server do the job of multiple computers, by sharing the resources of a single computer across multiple environments.
Installing traditional physical servers would typically require a separate server for each server role. By utilizing virtual server technology, the number of physical servers can be greatly reduced as virtual servers are consolidated on to fewer instances of physical hardware. Virtualizing servers will result in improved resource utilization as well as reductions in real estate, power and cooling requirements. In addition to energy saving and lower capital expenses due to more efficient use of hardware resources, virtualization provides high availability of resources, increased security, and improved disaster recovery processes.
A virtualized platform is highly scalable, meaning that adding additional virtual servers as your company grows does not incur the same project, labor or capital costs as adding additional physical servers. In addition, organizations that deploy a virtualized environment will also reduce their energy consumption and improve the effectiveness of their disaster recovery plan.
- Consolidation - Utilize less space, less power, less hardware to operate the same or larger application environment
- Cost control - Reduce capital costs and management costs through less hardware and reduced infrastructure administration
- Efficiency - Deliver applications in a highly efficient and scalable way
- Resilience - Leverage inherent benefits of virtualization including high availability and business continuity
- Green IT - Improve energy efficiency and reduce your carbon footprint
- Scalability - A virtualized infrastructure that can grow as your business does
B&A is passionate about enabling customers to focus on their strengths; confident in the knowledge that their IT systems will reliably support them and their colleagues in their business pursuits. This has been our focus for over ten years and we believe we've become quite good at it.
If you are serious about getting value from your current IT systems, or you're looking for ways to keep your business ahead of the competition, you will be amazed at how B&A can help. Let's talk results.
B&A advises clients on how to improve service and cut costs with the help of the latest business phone systems.
The latest business phone systems support VoIP telephony which offers a number of benefits over traditional phone systems. VoIP solutions are inherently flexible and scalable, translating into opportunities for significant operational benefits and efficiencies – as well as potential cost-savings in the long term.
As VoIP calls are in effect data, many systems facilitate integration with other applications, as well as allowing organizations to benefit from intelligent functionality.
For example, VoIP systems can incorporate sophisticated call routing, call handling and reporting functionality. And as VoIP data can be integrated with other data sources, relevant information (such as customer records) can be made instantly available to those on a given call.
VoIP enables truly seamless remote working for organizations working across multiple locations, or for those seeking to support home working (telecommuting) initiatives. In terms of implementation, as VoIP works over the data network, infrastructure can be simplified, as separate cabling is not required. B&A can advise your business on all such possibilities, ensuring that you select the solution that is right for you.
Full Service Support –Managed Services
Distinct from our complementary support service, our full support service is designed for customers who don’t have an expert in-house IT support function, and who prefer to focus management energies elsewhere.
With full support, we take complete responsibility for our customer's overall IT requirements, managing day-to-day IT services, providing long-term advice regarding IT-related business issues, and delivering exceptional value.
How do we do it? These are just some of the features that we believe makes our service unparalleled:
- Superior time-to-fix – our unique systems expedite problem resolution
- 7x24 Monitoring and Proactive management - preventing issues before they affect you.
- Vendor Management – allowing you to concentrate on running the business
- Focus on customer-satisfaction, not just technology
- Transparent - online reports on every aspect of our service-delivery.
- Highly trained staff - not just in technology, but also in customer services.
- Flexible service offering - tailored exactly to your business needs.
- Competitively priced - with real-time reports demonstrating where and how we deliver value.
- Fix Monthly Rate - allowing for easy, no surprised budgeting
- And a range of complementary services and expert partners to meet all the demands of dynamic businesses
B&A is passionate about enabling customers to focus on their strengths; confident in the knowledge that their IT systems will reliably support them and their colleagues in their business pursuits. This has been our focus for over ten years and we believe we've become quite good at it.
If you are serious about getting value from your current IT systems, or you're looking for ways to keep your business ahead of the competition, you will be amazed at how B&A can help. Let's talk results.
IT Projects – Staff Augmentation
Distinct from our full support service, "complementary support" is designed around the needs of businesses who have an expert, in-house IT function, but who still require additional expertise and input on a regular basis.
In this scenario, some clients come to us for specific services such as network management or user support. Whilst others see us as an additional flexible resource, working in partnership with the manager responsible for IT Services, and supplementing the in-house IT Support team.
Complementary Support Service clients can, in effect, pick and choose from a menu of our services, enhancing their in-house team with B&A expertise, as they see fit. The key point for Complementary Service clients is that they decide which services they need – and when.
For clients (who may also be Full Support or Complementary Support clients) seeking a reliable and proven partner to project manage and deliver crucial IT projects.
B&A has a long-standing track-record of delivering IT and telephony projects of various sizes, from simple upgrades to major network design and data center implementation projects. Our clients trust us to deliver when delivery matters.
Some of the projects we have delivered include:
- Complete data center builds or relocations with minimal downtime.
- Infrastructure upgrades projects. End-to-end designing, planning, procuring and implementing. Migrating data, refreshing infrastructure, manage user expectations.
- B&A perform smaller projects with the same professionalism as the larger ones. Single Server upgrades, introducing a new server into the domain.etc.
- Remote working solutions for companies where the management wants to work from home, to those clients who have hundreds of staff operating around the globe.
- Numerous security projects to manage Internet usage minimize potential security threats, remote access methodologies and meeting audit requirements.
- High availability and Disaster Recovery solutions. Using real-time replication, load-balancing, redundancy, clustering technologies or storage networking to meet the client’s needs.
- Where clients wish to locate infrastructure outside of their premises, B&A partners with co-location facilities offering a highly available networking framework to reliably host client's infrastructure.
- Overview
- Business Consulting
- Infrastructure Evaluation
- Infrastructure Design and Implementation
- Infrastructure Support and Maintenance
- User Support
- Information Security
- Remote Workers
- Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery
- Virtualization
- Telecommunications
- Full Service Support –Managed Services
- IT Projects – Staff Augmentation
- IT Project Management
Enterprise Infrastructure Design-Implementation
Computer Systems Integrations
Messaging - Email, PDAs, Fax, Voice Mail
IT Project Management
