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Every business has to decide how its IT is run. You can hire your own staff, train them and rely on them to handle every eventuality, you can hand the whole function to a third party, or you can do a mix of both. We offer all three, and we will tell you which one fits rather than which one we would rather sell.
Managed infrastructure is not a separate service here, it is part of the scope. Whether we take your endpoints, your servers, your perimeter, your LAN and cabling or all of it, it is agreed as one outsourcing arrangement with a clear line between what we own and what you own. Our What is Outsourcing white paper sets out the options in more depth.
The three models differ in who does what, not in the standard of the work. Whichever you choose, we write down who is responsible for each part of your IT and the service levels you can rely on, so nothing falls into the gap between two teams each assuming the other has it.
You keep your own IT staff and we take part of the function. A common split is your team handling desktops, laptops and devices while we manage the servers, network and connectivity, because a business can absorb a failed laptop but not a failed server. We can also act purely as technical backup to your team, add engineers during upgrades and office moves to shorten the disruption, or provide disaster recovery and business continuity alone.
We are your IT department: desktops, laptops, servers, connectivity and everything else. Total outsourcing suits a small business that does not want to employ IT staff, and a larger one that wants the whole function at a fixed budgetary cost. It comes in several levels, from entirely remote to engineers on site a few days a week or permanently.
Some businesses need IT staff on site all the time. We can supply them or you can, and either way they have our team, our parts and our resources behind them. When the worst happens, the people on your site are not on their own.
Picture two IT people employed directly by you, and a service that fails. It might be hardware, it might be software, it might be both, and either way the business waits while two people work through it. With a Hybrid agreement, the moment it goes wrong your team of two becomes a team of many, with near immediate access to our engineers, spare parts, software and cloud stand-ins to keep the business running while the fault is fixed.
If we supply your on-site staff, holidays, sickness, personality clashes and anything else that could leave the site uncovered become our problem rather than yours. When they cannot attend, we send someone else equally capable. If the on-site staff are your own, the agreement gives them somebody to escalate to and a team to cover them while they are away.
Infrastructure is the foundation every other service relies on. Designed well and managed properly, it goes unnoticed. Neglected, or left just about working, it becomes the source of outages, performance problems, failed changes and security gaps. Any of the following can be in scope, taken together or on their own.
Desktops, laptops, devices and the servers behind them, supported day to day and repaired under whichever break and fix option you choose. Fixed price hardware maintenance for servers, storage and network equipment is covered by our maintenance plans.
Gateways, firewalls and routers decide what can reach your systems and what your systems can reach, and one wrong rule can expose them in seconds. We manage them with standardised configurations, disciplined change control, firmware lifecycle management, regular policy review, segmentation, and safe publication through reverse proxies so services are not exposed unnecessarily.
Switching, VLAN design, routing, IP plans, DHCP and DNS, and Wi-Fi, with configuration managed so every change is controlled and traceable. That is what prevents the loops, broadcast storms, VLAN leakage, asymmetric routing and IP conflicts that are hardest to diagnose under pressure.
We install and maintain structured cabling in copper from CAT5e to CAT8, multimode fibre in OM3, OM4 and OM5, and singlemode OS2 fibre for campus and long distance runs. Every point we install is tested and certified, and you receive the documented results as evidence of performance.
Documentation and network diagrams that match what is actually installed. They shorten outages, make audits straightforward and make future change safer, because decisions are taken on accurate information rather than on somebody's memory.
Hardware fails, links go down and people make mistakes. We identify the single points of failure and remove them where it is worth doing, with diverse links, high availability firewall pairs and sensible failover, and we document recovery procedures and test them.
An outsourcing agreement can include any of our other services, and most do. They are described in full on their own pages rather than repeated here.
Outsourcing has traditionally meant a fixed monthly cost over a fixed term. Our remote outsourcing agreements are rolling contracts with no long term commitment: if you are not happy with the service, you can terminate at any time without penalty.
Billing can be mixed to suit how you use us. You can take your critical infrastructure at a fixed monthly cost and split out desktop support to pay only for the time it uses. Pay as you go work still carries a guaranteed service level; the time and materials are either drawn from a pre-paid retainer or invoiced monthly, with a full breakdown of what was done.
Proactive outsourcing adds planning to the agreement. We prepare, plan and implement disaster recovery and business continuity strategies with you, so that whatever happens to the building, the power or the hardware, IT is not the reason the business stops. We help set recovery objectives and priorities, so the investment goes where it matters most.
A plan that has never been run is a hope, not a plan. Our continuity programmes are tested and practised, so that when something does go wrong the recovery is a procedure people have followed before. If you have your own IT staff, proactive outsourcing is a good fit wherever IT is an important part of your business continuity.
Often it costs less than employing staff directly, because you are paying for the cover you need rather than for full time salaries, training and recruitment, and you get the depth of a whole team behind it. It is not always cheaper, and we would rather say so here than in the quotation.
Onshore. GEN are a UK company, and our outsourcing services are delivered in the UK by our own in-house engineers, with no offshore outsourcing.
Yes. Shared and Hybrid outsourcing are built around it. Your staff can keep the desktops, laptops and devices while GEN manage the servers, network and connectivity, or GEN can simply stand behind your team as technical backup, so that when something serious fails they have GEN's engineers, parts and resources to escalate to.
No long term commitment is required. GEN's remote outsourcing agreements are rolling contracts, and if you are not happy with the service you can terminate at any time without penalty. Arrangements that include staff on your site are set out in the quotation.
If GEN supply your on-site staff, holidays, sickness and anything else that keeps them away are GEN's problem, not yours: GEN send someone else equally capable so the site stays covered. If the on-site staff are your own, an outsourcing agreement gives them GEN's team to call on while they are away and when an issue needs escalating.
Yes. GEN install and maintain structured cabling in copper from CAT5e to CAT8, multimode fibre in OM3, OM4 and OM5, and singlemode OS2 fibre for campus and long distance runs. Every point is tested and certified, and the documented results are handed over as evidence of performance.
Often it costs less. Permanent on-site staff supplied by GEN cost slightly more than employing them directly, though not by much, and the cover for absence comes with them. Strict service levels, such as a 4 hour response 24 hours a day with cold spare hardware held, cost more, as does the risk they are there to cover.
It can be mixed. Critical infrastructure can be taken at a fixed monthly cost while desktop support is paid for as it is used. Pay as you go work still carries a guaranteed service level, and the time and materials are either drawn from a pre-paid retainer or invoiced monthly with a full breakdown.
Yes, as part of the scope of an outsourcing agreement. The circuits and SD-WAN themselves are covered by GEN's Connectivity service and remote access by GEN's Managed VPN service, and an outsourcing agreement can include both alongside the rest of your infrastructure.
In the UK. GEN's outsourcing services are onshore, delivered by GEN's own in-house engineers, with no offshore outsourcing.
A quotation is an obligation free assessment of your needs. We price it at your current level of cover and at several levels above, so you can see what each step buys and choose the right cover for your business.
Whether you want backup for your own team, somebody to take over the network, or a whole IT department, we will scope it with you and bring thirty-seven years of experience to it.
