While it would be nice if your company had IT staff members that were experts in every technology, that is just not realistic. And today, many companies face the challenge of finding the appropriate and specialized expertise that is required to deal with ongoing issues such as network optimization, performance degradations, network risks, and more.

Companies must understand that it’s sometimes necessary to look for expertise outside of their own organization.

That is where Professional Services come in. Businesses can use a specialty firm with specific expertise in lieu of a single consulting firm (or single person). Companies can also use a firm that will bring in multiple resources with the needed expertise when necessary. For instance, would you go to a general practitioner if you needed knee surgery? Most likely not—you would go see a specialist.

Companies who leverage Professional Services teams are typically able to solve challenges sooner, and at a lower cost, than generalists who have to spend more time and money on research.

For example, the Neustar Professional Services team has great expertise of the DDI (DNS, DHCP and IPAM) and web application and performance spaces:

• DNS performance and reliability
• DNS Security (DDOS and Cache Poisoning/DNSSEC)
• Differences in public and private DNS
• DHCP and IPAM in the private network
• DNS as a core protocol comingles with other technologies, such as DHCP, IPv6, IPAM and VoIP
• Web applications, architectures and protocols
• Web Security

Recently, Neustar Professional Services were called in to help provide Moffat County School District in Colorado with some additional expertise in this area. While, initial discussions were related to Neustar’s UltraDDI service, it was soon determined that the product would not solve the specific network performance issues that they were experiencing. From there, Moffat turned to the Professional Services team to help investigate the issues by having them conduct a network assessment.

Often times it is difficult for organizations to understand the value of an assessment; here are some key areas why it’s imperative:

• Familiarizes the Professional Services team with the customer environment in the quickest, most economical way possible
• Provides a holistic view of the entire network ensuring nothing is overlooked by the Professional Services team
• Leveraging the Professional Services team’s knowledge, possible issues can be identified across the board
• Systematic approach to assessments and troubleshooting
• Customer is provided with a plan for remediation with flexibility (or priorities) in resolution
• Customer gets to see what the end will look like, with a plan to get there
• Customer gets documentation of its infrastructure, which is often times lacking

In this case, the network assessment we conducted not only identified (with root cause) the issues Moffat was experiencing, but also remediated as part of assessment, ultimately improving productivity of all users across the network. Additionally, Moffat found that the cost of degradation issues in time lost, network troubleshooting and other vendors far outweighed the cost of the assessment.

Bringing in the right expertise proved beneficial, to ensure the network stayed in optimal operation. So much so, Moffat requested ongoing strategic support, ensuring the network does not slip back to a point where Moffat begins losing significant productivity again.

Today, with just a few hours a month of consulting time, Moffat knows that they always have access to the necessary level of expertise directly related to its unique tech requirements, services and network operations.

Additional expertise is just one area that Professional Services can help with. Our next post will focus on maximizing service ROI through Professional Services speed to deployment and flexibility—so stay tuned!

Written by James Willett, VP of Professional Services and Sales Engineering at Neustar