CCSI
Easy-to-Manage, Intelligent IT Services

In the early 1970s, organizations were upgrading to the newly built mainframes that were making their way into the enterprise market. However, most firms did not have a deep understanding of the then modern infrastructures and needed assistance to implement and maintain them at their facilities. Enter CCSI, with its vision to provide superior services for the management of these operational stations. Having found its footing, the company has not looked back when it comes to developing new technology for businesses to optimally run their processes. On that note, CCSI started building skill sets around the router switch internetworking infrastructure world that had packet switching capabilities. The connected architecture had voice added over it, and security on top using a plan, design, implement and operate (PDIO) model. Currently, the company has ventured into the more complex and sophisticated technological landscape by leveraging state-of-the-art cybersecurity and cloud technology while still providing service administration of mainframes. Larry Bianculli, Managing Director at CCSI, in an interview with CIO Applications, talks about the company’s services and solutions that have propelled it to great heights in the managed IT services realm.

What are the challenges that CCSI wanted to mitigate while they were working toward improving its service offerings?

Companies are transforming, and their evolution needs to be supported by more services as well as “day two” support that need highly advanced system networking. We launched a network operations center or managed IT services to monitor the health and components of our customers’ networks. The facility launched in the early 2000s offers clients 24/7 support and adds stability to our PDIO model. A challenge that is really affecting organizations across varied industries is managing the complexities that technology brings to the table. While large firms can hire a task force specific to IT, most smaller and mid-sized firms do not have the budget to employ personnel only for this purpose. For the majority of our customers looking for managed IT services, we provide them with extended bench strength from where they can draw expertise without having to hire and pay for additional benefits.

We offer cybersecurity, cloud computing services, and day two support monitoring all under one roof. Over the last ten years, we have seen many customers try to adopt a digital business model, and the clients that embrace this disruption put themselves at an advantage in comparison to their peers. In the past, if you had a good offering, you could make a lot of money with it. Today, it is not about technology anymore; it is about how you use it and incorporate solutions.

We assist clients in assimilating their options and can guide them on their journey toward a digital plan that distinguishes them from their competition.

What are the managed IT services that CCSI offers in the present enterprise world?

We have solutions that we provide across a horizontal barrier to go around the different technological silos, and that is our ability to provide managed network and security operations. It all starts with talent; CCSI goes through a very rigorous process of hiring only the best that we can find and attract. We have recruited some of the top personnel from a cybersecurity standpoint. We start by offering customers security awareness and assessment, DDoS simulation, ransomware testing, and risk assessments. Another offering is vulnerability management that allows customers to discover weaknesses within their environments and prioritize the focus on remediation. Our patch management offers customers the power to manage their operating systems, third-party applications, and provide reports on where their posture analysis needs to be improved. We can implement our services and solutions either individually, as a combination of choices, or as a whole package under CCSI’s Threat Protect banner. Besides, securing networks and infrastructure of clients, we also provide managed email and end-point services for internal audit of the most sensitive assets at organizations, its staff.

We have the same procedure for cloud services; we offer visibility as a service (VaaS). With VaaS, we can provide customers clarity into their workloads after they moved data away from their in-house data centers into the cloud. We have migration as a service, disaster recovery, and backup as well as cost containment as a service for customers who have found out that they do not save money when they move to the cloud and want to see a method to get costs more in-line.

Could you elaborate on a customer success story to substantiate CCSI’s excellent service cadre?

A large e-commerce retailer needed advice on a migration that it wanted to stage, and found themselves in a situation where they were having outages as they were scaling. CCSI proposed that our staff would be on site to help them get their network back up and running at optimal condition. The process went on for several days and professionals were working round-the-clock to report to the retailer. As a result, they saw our ability to be dedicated to their success and have since then begun utilizing more of our services.

What are some of CCSI’s recent achievements, and what plans does it have in store for the future?

CCSI has won many accolades over the years and has many illustrious partnerships that allow us to offer maximum value to our customers. One prestigious certification that CCSI has is the AICPA SOC 2 Certification; it provides for us to be seen as leaders in the tech arena. As far as our roadmap goes, we continually push to innovate and build out on our offerings. We will continue to improve our cybersecurity solutions as well as our cloud offering, and then actually begin to fuse the two. As customers continue to adopt cloud services at a pretty high rate, we are currently developing innovative solutions that will interlace cloud computing and cybersecurity. It will allow clients to be more compliant, and to have superior governance over their workloads in the cloud.