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May 18, 2010 Bookmark and Share

The Teams behind the Team at Itomic

Do you think that Itomic support starts and ends with the staff in our Perth & Melbourne offices? Think again! There are teams behind the team, which helps us sleep better at night and delivers our valued customers superior service. Getting these teams into position and working efficiently has been part of the evolution of our company (yes, plenty of trial and error along the way!), and are now part-and-parcel of our standard service for all our clients.

1. 24/7 English-speaking Australian-based telephone service. Our standard office hours are 9-5 Mon - Fri, but with offices in Perth and Melbourne (different time zones) it means that we've actually got onsite technical staff keeping an eye on things for between at least 10 and 11 hours of every working day. In the rare event that we don't answer our landlines in a prompt fashion during normal working hours, or a client calls outside of normal working hours, then the call will be redirected to a 24/7 operator. They'll take your message and email and/or SMS it directly to us. If the issue is urgent (where 'urgent' is defined as not being able to wait until the next working day) then your operator will begin an 'escalation' process involving text messages then phone calls to mobiles and/or home landlines in order to alert technical staff to the issue. Just like a terminator, they will not stop, ever, until an Itomic staff member is reached (as opposed to terminated, thank goodness). The MD (that's me!) is on the list of people to wake up as a last resort, and this has happened once or twice. His wife wasn't very impressed when it happened at 5.30am a few Saturday mornings ago, but hey, at least it means the system's working!

2. 24/7 Advanced website hosting support + additional offsite backup services. Website hosting is an integral part of our core service offering. Just like a chef in his/her own kitchen, we do our best work when we're working in our own controlled technical hosting environment, an environment that we've built and refined over time. But here's the thing: our absolute primary focus is designing and building fabulous websites. So whilst website hosting is a critical core service, in the final analysis it's a actually a supporting service to our web design services. Which means that we just want it to work extremely well (for us and our clients) without having to take away resources to tend to it all the time. Which is why we employ a US-based 'elite' web server support team to back us up (literally and metaphorically). The Internet is actually an incredibly 'hostile' environment from the point of view of web server management: the paradox is that on the one hand you're trying to allow a server to be as 'open' as possible to the outside world in order to make information incredibly accessible and interactive, on the other you're trying very hard to stop unauthorised persons or programs (or both) from exploiting that openness, and so constant vigilance is required to properly manage firewalls, security patches, anti-virus software, etc. But I digress slightly. The point is that, behind the scenes, we're enjoying a long and mutually beneficial relationship with a fantastic company who are experts at advanced web server management and nothing else. Not only are they constantly monitoring the health of our servers for us (and are empowered to resolve any issues even when we're sleeping), but we get to bounce ideas off them for all things server related. In a nutshell, and to use common pop-culture vernacular - these guys rock!

3. Data Centre Technicians. These guys work at the quality data centres we use in Australia and the US. They are the last line of defence for us when it comes to "hands on" intervention with our hosting servers, e.g. when a hard drive needs replacing and no amount of remote access is going to cut it. Thankfully these sort of interventions are rarely required, but invaluable when they are.

So a big "thanks" from the team at Itomic to the (mostly) unsung heroes in the teams behind Itomic! Couldn't do it without you, guys!

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