While many businesses in the UK effectively shut down from 24th December to 2nd January, more than 30 countries don’t celebrate Christmas at all – and in many more, it is a minority celebration. With around 67% of the world non-Christians – it’s fair to say that for several billions, 25th December is just another working day. Even within the Christmas-celebrating countries, an increasing number of organisations continue to be open for business- hospitality, health/ emergency services and call centres, for example.

If you are an MSP with customers in parts of the world that do not ‘do Christmas’ or are supporting organisations that are ‘always on’ and who need to be sure that their networks and service desk continue to function smoothly despite the holidays, how will you be providing cover this year?

MSPs have typically used a range of approaches to ensure their customers are supported over the holidays. You may have your own NOC, supported by full-time staff; or full-time staff members working from home offices to monitor customer systems. You may be outsourcing some NOC services to a monitoring partner; you may be outsourcing all NOC services. Or you may be doing something completely different.

These days, there is an expectation that your staff will be available around the clock, including weekends and holiday periods. Customers expect these same staff to have the necessary skills to monitor, analyse and resolve any issues that occur. Fortunately, in today’s virtual world, monitoring and maintenance can be carried out remotely – so at least there is no need for your people to be on the customer’s site.

In the light of this, how confident are you about your Christmas cover plans?

Is your NOC and service desk always open? Do you have well-trained technicians constantly accessible over the holidays? Is your support team located in purpose-built premises, supported by the latest RMM and service desk software and with controlled access to client information?

Or are you jiggling rotas and shift patterns over the holiday period? Will your on-call technicians be clutching a mobile in one hand and a turkey leg in the other? Will you be suffering from 24/7 phone addiction – a server might go down, an alert might get missed, a customer might email at midnight, a router might die…best not to sleep, just in case.

Your customers don’t care if it’s Christmas, New Year, Diwali or Hanukkah. They want access from the beach, at 3am, in the air, underground… and they want it NOW on all of their devices! Are you keeping pace with their expectations?

Are you able to offer them a true 24/7 service, 365 days a year with ‘always on’ monitoring, remediation, maintenance and support? Or might your 24/7 support provision fall apart if an engineer falls asleep and misses that vital text message?

One option is to ensure your NOC cover is put on a firm footing by outsourcing to a partner like Inbay. We can deliver true 24/7 services in any time zone and provide an ‘always on’ service to any location – enabling you to extend and improve your customers’ experience and service larger customers with more complex needs.

Think about outsourcing your service-desk too. We can provide first line support, in hours, out-of-hours, 24/7, 365 days a year. We never close, ever.

Outsourcing NOC and /or service-desk to a trusted partner means you can be confident that your customers are being supported in a controlled environment which, combined with rigorous support procedures, will produce a superlative service.

And it also means you can relax and have yourself a merry little Christmas!