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Monitoring and service management

Case CSC

Monitoring service frees up time for development and helps improve the level of service

The mission of CSC – IT Center for Science is to produce high-quality ICT expert services for organisations such as Finnish higher education institutions and public administration. Digia supports CSC in this mission by providing 24-hour monitoring services for its ICT environments. Among other benefits, the partnership has helped CSC improve their level of service and develop their services.

  CSC – IT Center for Science Ltd. is a Finnish centre of expertise in information technology owned by the Finnish state and higher education institutions. It provides its customers with high-quality ICT expert services. The company’s biggest customers are the Ministry of Education and Culture, Finnish higher education institutions, research institutes and public administration. 

“We needed to improve our ability to react to disruptions outside working hours. We didn’t want to create our 24/7 monitoring centre because it would have required extensive shift arrangements. We started looking for a good partner to take charge of round-the-clock monitoring services, and Digia won the tender”, says CSC’s Director Juha Oinonen, who is responsible for the centre’s service.

CSC wanted to find a partner that could run a 24/7 monitoring centre and was capable of committing to fast response times. Finding a reliable, long-term partner that could offer scalable services was also important. 

“CSC’s goal was to find a partner based in Finland that met the strict data security requirements of Katakri level IV. Because of the nature of their environments, CSC’s SLA requirements are strict when reacting to various triggers. Our service corresponds very well to those requirements. Digia has the necessary know-how, experience, and good references from similar partnerships. We also have an ISO 27001 certificate as proof of our long-term approach to developing data security management, which we do in close collaboration with our customers”, explains Digia’s Service Manager, Teppo Kekäläinen. 

What we did

What we used

The partnership has gone well. Digia’s experts are very knowledgeable, easy to reach and committed to working together

Juha Oinonen, Director, CSC

Monitoring services help ensure the functionality of ICT services

One of the key objectives of the monitoring services is to help ensure the continued functionality of ICT infrastructure and services by monitoring triggers. In practice, Digia extensively monitors CSC’s core system environments. The service aims to prevent disruptions from having adverse effects on service functionality. With Digia’s monitoring service, CSC receives triggers and situation reports immediately, allowing disruptions to be resolved quickly. The service can even help prevent disruptions from occurring.

“The partnership has gone well. Digia’s experts are very knowledgeable, easy to reach and committed to working together”, Oinonen says.

According to Oinonen, the service deployment also went efficiently and flexibly. The deployment project started in May 2021 and was completed in September of the same year, after which the service was piloted and adopted. The service has been used for two years and expanded by adding new components.

What new opportunities have the partnership and the service created for CSC in practice?

“We can offer our customers better service than previously at a reasonable cost using an operational model and division of duties convenient to us. According to an external service provider, the change has improved our focus on our core operations regarding service development and production. Internally, we have also made certain practices, such as incident management, more flexible and standardised”, Oinonen explains.

Up-to-date information about system functionality is more important than ever

The everyday collaboration between CSC and Digia is close and efficient. The functionality of the monitoring service is actively tracked, and together, the two organisations can quickly react to identified development needs.  

“Today, up-to-date information about system functionality might be more important than ever, and demand for service management services has grown. Organisations want to identify possible disruptions before they happen so that they can react in time. The challenge is having multiple systems and maintenance teams. As an external partner, we can offer off-the-shelf processes and operational models for centralised monitoring. CSC is a great example of our ability to support the development of our customers’ organisations”, Kekäläinen says. 

 

Find out more about the benefits of overview and monitoring services >> 

Find out more about the expansion of the partnership: Digia has been chosen to supply for the CSC – IT Center for Science Ltd.’s Digivisio 2030 project >>