ScienceSoft’s Approach to Automation in Managed IT Services

Some MSPs promise 100% automation. But while automation can speed up many IT processes, human involvement is still essential. A monitoring tool can automatically allocate additional CPU cores every time a server's CPU usage exceeds 90%. But wouldn’t it be wiser to find the root cause of such upsurges and resolve it?

In fear of incurring high automation costs or overlooking security vulnerabilities, some companies lean toward a manual approach to managing IT infrastructure. However, completely avoiding IT automation leads to hours of unnecessary manual work and poses a higher risk of human errors.

• Regular software and infrastructure updates.
• Data backup and recovery.
• L1 help desk ticket routing.
• Performance monitoring and resource scaling.

• Urgent infrastructure updates.
• Complex network configurations.
• Updating and patching critical systems (like servers hosting essential applications).

• Complex software and infrastructure updates.
• Security incident monitoring and response.
• L2-L3 help desk ticket routing.

A performance monitoring system detects that several Windows services have stopped and some software functionality has become unavailable. The system restarts the services and alerts ScienceSoft's team about the incident.

A security monitoring system detects an incident via a cybersecurity monitoring tool and alerts our team. Our cybersecurity experts investigate the situation, identify the incident's root cause, and apply changes to the infrastructure to avoid similar incidents in the future.

For companies developing software in-house, our DevOps engineers can integrate IaC (Infrastructure as Code) into the CI/CD pipeline. This approach helps:

• Quickly set up delivery environments, from development to production.
• Consistently reproduce configurations.
• Integrate seamlessly with cloud providers and scale infrastructure resources up or down based on demand.

In case of an increased server load that is expected to last, ScienceSoft’s team can suggest adding another server, indicating its possible type, environment, and other details. After the customer’s approval, a new server can be configured automatically using tools like Azure DevOps, Atlassian Bamboo, Jenkins, etc.

Incoming tickets are routed automatically to suitable L1 support agents according to issue type and urgency. For example, a specific agent only receives user administration requests (creation/deactivation/modification of user accounts, adding/removing users from groups, etc.), while the other one only receives requests concerning software setup.

L2 and L3 support teams automatically receive relevant tickets. However, due to their complexity, a support team lead manually escalates or allocates them to the right support engineer based on their expertise. For example, a change request ticket on updating Azure firewall rules will be manually assigned to a specific L3 engineer.