Maximize uptime, optimize
performance and lower total
cost of your business and
mission critical solutions
Premier Mission
Critical Support
Practice Areas
Benefits
•
Improved collaboration
across teams
•
Reduced time to recover
•
Accelerated change,
adoption and time to value
•
Exposed risks that limit
service disruptions
•
Lowered operational risk
•
Reduced risk of disruption
reoccurrence
Supporting and optimizing the breadth of your mission
critical systems is hard and success requires a focused
team effort. Microsoft Services Premier Mission Critical
can be part of your successful team.
Your business success is directly tied to the health and stability of your Microsoft
solution. This is especially true for your business and mission critical solutions. With
Microsoft Services Premier Mission Critical (PMC) you receive Microsoft’s
advanced level of service and support to help you extract more value out of your
mission critical solutions built on Microsoft technologies.
Introduction to PMC Practice Areas
PMC is a holistic, in-depth solution, covering the interdependencies and
interactivities among Microsoft server products across your mission critical
environment. PMC emphasizes a proactive approach that helps maximize uptime,
optimize performance and lower the total cost of ownership for your mission
critical solution. All services and activities that PMC delivers are aligned to three
Practice Areas:
• Assess & Plan
• Optimize & Remediate
• Restore & Protect
These Practice Areas work together, are continual and mutually reinforcing. Assess
& Plan is about thoroughly assessing your solution environment and developing a
comprehensive plan to drive ongoing solution stability and improvement.
Optimize & Remediate focuses on establishing business continuity by executing
services and practices that improve health and performance across the entire
Microsoft solution environment. Restore & Protect, which is focused on restoring
systems during service interruptions, is also directly related to the other two
Practice Areas as we leverage root cause learnings to safeguard the system and
help keep problems from reoccurring.
PMC Practice Areas provide a continual
focus on learning, optimization and
ongoing solution improvement
Assess & Plan
Assess
& Plan
The Assess and Plan Practice Area is about a continual focus on learning,
assessment and planning. During Assess & Plan, we perform an exhaustive
assessment of the solution environment covering architecture, supportability, and
technology. This starts with a series of Baseline Assessments including: Discovery
Assessment, Optimization Assessment and Supportability Assessment.
Consistent with our proactive approach, the Baseline Assessments serve two
purposes. First, they form the basis for a holistic plan that we build with you around
a solution optimization strategy and the prescriptive steps we will execute together
to get there. Second, for knowledge transfer, as the PMC Solution Team uses them
to brief support engineers to understand your business and solution.
During Assess & Plan, we also perform a series of technology based assessments
that evaluate different Microsoft technologies to understand existing health and
performance. Each Risk & health Assessment as a Service baselines your
configuration against standards and best practices obtained from over 20,000
customer assessments. This allows us to identity issues and potential risks against
the baseline.
Assess & Plan: Discovery Assessment
Receive a tailored set of discovery sessions to help align business, technology and
project details for your solution.
What to Expect: Each Discovery Session fulfills a distinct purpose and specific
output to ensure knowledge and documentation transfer to the Microsoft PMC
Solution Team. This helps to initiate you as a PMC customer and ensures the PMC
team specialists are prepared to support your solution.
Core Discovery Sessions:
• Business and Solution Overview
• Logical and Physical Solution Overview
• Technical Deep Dive Sessions for solution components
• Support Model, Teams and Escalation Routes
• Common Issues and Risks
• Planning & review of the Optimization Assessment
Result: The PMC Solution Team uses the data collected from your environment
and existing documentation to build their detailed understanding of your solution
environment..
Assess & Plan: Optimization Assessment
Optimization Assessment
areas of focus
Optimized Solution Stack
Architecture & Standards
Lifecycle & Roadmap
Vendor Governance
Service Management
Test & Release
Security Management
Disaster Recovery
Business Alignment
Identify possible issues and risks affecting uptime and stability through the
Infrastructure Optimization (IO) maturity model. This model is Microsoft’s
systematic process for assessing your IT processes, infrastructure and application
platform to target vital elements of your mission critical solution. This is a crucial
component for building an agreed to delivery plan.
What to Expect: This assessment is completed in two parts and results in key tasks
and action identification to help both you and the PMC team track the progress
throughout the PMC engagement.
High-Level Survey: Completed by you and your PMC Solution Team, this survey
helps to gain insight into the people, process and technologies associated with
your solution. The survey aligns to the Manage, Plan, Deliver and Operate phases
in the Microsoft Operations Framework (MOF), which provides the necessary
guidance for all of the activities and processes involved in managing an IT service.
Dedicated Discovery Session: The PMC Solution Team walks you through the most
critical elements identified in the High-Level Survey. This session helps you and the
PMC Solution Team understand the current state and ensure desired state for
optimizing the solution.
Continued…
Result: A common understanding of the critical aspects of the solution that
require improvement.
Assess & Plan: Supportability Assessment
Determine key problem areas which may affect your solution and its supportability.
What to Expect: Based on the outputs of the first two assessments, the PMC
Solution Team documents key issues with the implementation and the areas of the
solution which can be optimally supported through the PMC engagement. The
team also maps out key areas of your solution which may require remediation,
enhancements or processes to be in place to help ensure support.
Result: A supportability document detailing the technical support model, key
issues and technical components covered.
Assess & Plan: Technology Assessments
Proactively surface issues and risks affecting the technology side of your solution
through Microsoft Risk & health Assessments as a Service.
What to Expect: As needed, PMC will deliver a variety of assessments for
identified Microsoft technologies. These assessments are used to proactively
baseline your technology to surface issues and risks that may be negatively
affecting solution health and performance. This cloud based service helps prevent
problems by identifying areas upfront that we can prioritize with you for
remediation. Once the toolset used to gather data is installed on your
environment, the assessment can be rerun at regular intervals throughout the
PMC engagement to continually monitor health and identity opportunities for
improvement.
Result: A customized report detailing identified issues and risks that the PMC will
work with you to prioritize for remediation activities.
Optimize & Remediate
As a part of the Optimize & Remediate Practice Area, we execute a series of
proactive services focused on improving operational health, stability and
performance across people, process, and technology.
Optimize
& Remediate
At a people level, this includes readiness and knowledge transfer activities. These
readiness related activities are designed to help your IT team learn to manage and
support the mission critical solution. We also offer a series of process optimization
related services.
Optimize & Remediate: Service Summary
The following are the key activities and services the PMC Solution Team will deliver
.during Optimize & Remediate.
PMC Solution DSE
A Designated Support Engineer (DSE) facilitates the maintenance services and
learns your environment thoroughly. Solution DSEs are specialists in Microsoft
technologies who are familiar with your solution type. The PMC Solution DSE
works in collaboration with the PMC TAM and Customer Lead as necessary to
provide maintenance services and deliver other proactive services. They also
provide ongoing advice and guidance.
Onsite visits
Members of the PMC Specialist Team can spend 2-3 days onsite with your team
on a regularly scheduled basis. The number of visits is specified by your
contract. These visits achieve two goals: to familiarize the PMC Specialist Team
with any changes to the solution environment, and to provide structured
knowledge transfer from the PMC Specialist Team to your team.
PMC-specific proactive services
Based on your specific needs, you may receive additional tailored proactive
services including tools and troubleshooting, proactive advice and guidance and
follow-on reviews either onsite or remotely. These services may be recommended
by the Solution DSE, TAM or Customer Lead.
Workshops and Proactive Operational Programs
PMC offers a wide variety of readiness-centric workshops that provide guidance
for using and managing Microsoft products. These workshops cover diverse topics
such as deployment, manageability, configuration and support. If you require
assistance in improving IT service management processes, PMC offers a variety of
services focused on process assessment and improvement built on the IT
Infrastructure Library (ITIL) or Microsoft Operational Framework (MOF) models and
practices.
Remediation & Optimization
Learnings from technology assessments that we execute within Assess & Plan are
leveraged in order to optimize your mission critical solution. The PMC Solution
Team works with your IT team to prioritize identified issues, build a mutually
agreed to plan and perform remediation activities. Additionally, a PMC Solution
DSE will work with your team to execute additional optimization activities that
arose out of the Optimization Plan performed previously.
Monthly Hotfix Report
A concise listing, available monthly, consisting of all public patches and hotfixes
released for the specific Microsoft products within your solution.
Restore & Protect
While PMC proactively addresses issues and risks before they become problems, if
.the mission critical solution does experience service interruptions, performance
issues or downtime then PMC is poised and ready to help.
Restore
& Protect
When you call for support from PMC, you talk to someone who is familiar with
your solution. Each member of your PMC Solution Team dedicated to supporting
your solution reviews the final Baseline Assessment documents and plans
produced during Assess & Plan.
PMC offers the fastest solution-based response times available from Microsoft,
helping to ensure PMC customers are provided with the highest level of solution
support available from Microsoft. As a PMC customer, you receive accelerated
access to senior support engineers working to restore your system quickly.
Throughout the escalation, the PMC Solution Team stays engaged.
Restore & Protect: Service Summary
The following are the key activities and services the PMC Solution Team will deliver
during Restore & Protect.
Accelerated access to Senior Support Engineers
Escalation begins with a designated PMC Solution Team who has knowledge of
your solution and environment.
Solution stack support
PMC provides support for all identified Microsoft technologies within your solution
stack. Solution stack support covers the interdependencies between Microsoft
products across your solution.
30-minute response time backed by financial credits
For every severity 1/A incident, the team provides a 30-minute response time
twenty-four hours a day. This action is backed by financial credits based on the
percentage of incidents in which the SLA is met or missed.
Restore & Protect
When you have service interruptions our first priority is to restore your solution as
quickly as possible. Once that is accomplished, PMC includes responsive support
based on the learnings from management of the critical situation. After the
conclusion of the critical situation, the PMC Solution Team will perform additional
analysis aimed at discovering the root cause of the system issue. These learnings
are then used to feed ongoing planning and remediation, safeguarding against
system issue reoccurrence
Your PMC Solution Team
PMC TAM
Technical
Account Manager
PMC Solution DSE
Designated
Support Engineer
PMC
Customer
Lead
Manages relationship and
experience with you for this
engagement
Acts as a Technology Specialist
for key technologies within your
solution
Acts as your solution expert
focused on the entire stack
Manages overall Service Delivery
Plan, including time and
schedules service delivery
Focused on proactive service
delivery & solution optimization
Oversees alignment of service
delivery expectations
Customer advocate across
Microsoft
Infusing solution knowledge in
optimizes key technologies
Contribute to overall solution
knowledge for PMC Solution
Team
Provides guidance, advice and
knowledge transfer
Availability: business hours
Readies dedicated support team
for accelerated response to
support solution 24x7
Collaborates with DSE for
solution oriented advice &
guidance
Available to answer day to day
questions
Orchestrates proactive & reactive
support and escalations with the
Delivery Team Unit
Availability: business hours
Availability: business hours
Delivery Team Unit
PMC | Solution
Engineers
A virtual team of dedicated PMC experts who understand the
customer’s unique solution environment. Back your PMC
Solution Team with quality proactive and reactive services.
Availability: 24x7
Primary engineering contact
leading overall Asses & Plan,
Optimize & Remediate and
Restore & Protect Practice Area
Put a Microsoft team in your corner with Premier
Mission Critical level of service and support
Assess & Plan
Rigorous, ongoing assessment and planning
Assess
& Plan
PMC assesses your solution, understanding business drivers and core capabilities across
people, process, and technology. This is done through a focus on continual learning
of your solution environment that starts by executing a series of baseline supportability
and technology assessments, enabling us to build and maintain a comprehensive plan
of improvement activities.
•
Key technology assessments
•
Establishment and maintenance of a comprehensive optimization plan
•
Service Delivery Plan highlighting services and activities to be delivered
Optimize & Remediate
Comprehensive optimization across people, process & technology
Optimize
& Remediate
PMC executes a proactive approach to system optimization, anticipating and preventing
problems through corrective action and remediation and providing advice and guidance
to help optimize your mission critical solution. We help drive people readiness through
workshops, chalk talks and custom training services. PMC also offers process optimization
services that drive improvement of key operational processes.
•
Designated Support Engineer leading a prescribed set of remediation
and optimization activities
•
Collaborative delivery model driving knowledge transfer, education
and best practice use
•
Educational and process improvement workshops
Restore & Protect
Precision restoration and safeguarding of the environment if disruptions occur
Restore
& Protect
PMC delivers a focus on restoring business operations quickly, safeguarding against
system issue reoccurrence, and translating root cause analysis learning into solution
improvement. PMC provides differentiated responsiveness from senior level Microsoft
support engineers and access 7x24x365.
•
Accelerated response financially backed by Service Level Agreement
•
Comprehensive knowledge of the solution environment provided
by a team that knows you and your solution
•
Persistent collaboration throughout the restoration process