Anexinet Doubles Down On Managed Services With NOC-SOC Offering

The solution provider is working with vendors including LogicMonitor and Alert Logic on the packaged service to supplement corporate IT teams.

Known for its digital transformation "kickstart" services around strategy and solutions creation, solution provider powerhouse Anexinet is expanding its managed services practice with a new packaged Network Operating Center and Security Operating Center offering.

Anexinet's new NOC-SOC service aims to alleviate overburdened IT departments for customers, at a time when many IT staffs are stretched thin or being reduced as part of cost-saving measures.

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"All of these things are an effort to help our customers that either don't have the staff levels they need to be able to operate this 24/7, or potentially they've had to get rid of some staff recently—or they just don't have the tools capability," said Ryan Benner, vice president of infrastructure services at the Blue Bell, Pa.-based company.

Anexinet, No. 212 on CRN's Solution Provider 500 for 2020, is ramping up the managed services side of its business to complement its kickstart programs and solutions-building practices—which cover areas such as enterprise mobility, cloud/hybrid IT and data center modernization.

The addition of the NOC-SOC offering is "really around completing the life-cycle engagement with the customer," Benner said. "We've got a great portfolio of offerings around strategy and build. But we needed to enhance our portfolio around the manage aspect. So now we've got a capability to engage across the full life cycle of technology."

Anexinet launched new partnerships with several vendors at the end of 2019 that are being leveraged in the NOC-SOC offering. Those include LogicMonitor for the NOC offering, Alert Logic for the SOC offering, Kaseya for managed desktop capabilities and Cherwell for IT service management.

Operations support provided by the offering includes cloud management, backup and recovery, security alerts and desktop management.

The NOC offering is focused around monitoring and managing customer infrastructure, whether it's on-premises or cloud-based. AI-based capabilities enable enhanced correlation of events, allowing more proactive alerting and better root cause analysis after an adverse event, Benner said.

During Anexinet's evaluation of the numerous competing vendors in the market, LogicMonitor stood out thanks to its partner focus, its cloud deployment model and its capability to monitor "just about every infrastructure, platform and device you can think of, as well as every public cloud," Benner said. "It's all built in."

Meanwhile, the SOC offering, which leverages Alert Logic's managed detection and response platform, is aimed at finding and remediating adverse security events. The solution aggregates event data from multiple sources, deploys sensors to aggregate additional data and runs the collected data through Alert Logic tooling to provide alerting back to Anexinet's managed services team—which then gets to work on finding the source of the security event and putting a stop to it, Benner said.

The Kaseya-based managed desktop offering provides management and patching for desktops, while also having optional management for Office 365 and endpoint security.

Ultimately, the new packaged offering helps customers to reduce their risk and enhance their operational stability, while benefiting from a predictable cost structure and lessened demands on staff, Benner said.

"Companies have been struggling for a while to find good IT talent, especially good security talent, and it's become really expensive to hire very experienced engineers," he said. "Managed services has been an area of growth for companies like us. And obviously with the downturn and workforces going remotely, it even becomes more critical to look for some help."