Maximising value-for-money is as important today as ever.

We work hard to understand what hardware would best suit a customer’s needs and the tasks the hardware will be required to support. We then specify and source the equipment from reputable manufacturers.

AM CSS will upgrade standard units if they do not meet the required specification rather than purchasing a standard unit that is over-specified, and therefore costlier, than is actually required. We will also perform in-place upgrades to existing hardware and perform migrations from old to new hardware.

AM CSS handles our customers’ software and licence purchases. We can also advise on free or low-cost alternatives to many standard applications as well as ensuring the software is safe to use and kept up-to-date.

We setup and configure desktops and laptops with optimised performance and security settings and remove the bloating software often installed by manufacturers and the Windows operating system.

AM CSS utilise Cloud-based control systems for equipment such as routers, network switches and wireless access points. This provides us with the capacity to configure and manage network infrastructure devices remotely, as well as monitoring uptime and taking configuration snapshots.

We use our Remote Monitoring and Management (RMM) system to manage mobile devices, coupled with other systems, such as Microsoft InTune. This gives us the ability to install apps, restrict usage to approved apps only, remotely locate, lock and wipe devices and enforce security policies. MDM includes anti-virus and anti-malware protection.

Through our RMM system, we manage and monitor virus and malware protection on EndPoints, including firewall settings and policies to minimise potential infections. We use a default-deny system that blocks anything that it doesn’t recognise as being a legitimate process and we receive an alert that we can analyse.

Our Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) system tracks and provides analysis of any threats that hit the system. This gives us information about the threat, such as how the attack got into the environment, the scope of the full attack chain and any lateral file movements across an environment.

EDR helps us respond quickly to any event and gives us the information required to halt it, recover from it and prevent recurrence.

AM CSS install, configure, maintain and monitor all the services that run on a server for local and wide-area networks and across multiple sites.

Standard services are User Accounts and Security Groups, File and Printer sharing, databases, backup, remote access options, network addressing, network security policies and multi-server/location distributed file systems.

For several years now, the use of virtualisation technology has reduced the number of physical servers required to run server services, databases and line of business applications. Instead, a single physical server can host multiple virtual servers (and desktops). This is very resource-efficient and produces savings in running costs as well as saving on the initial purchase of multiple servers.

AM CSS have a lot of experience in building and managing hosts and virtual servers and desktops, including migrating existing physical servers on to virtual hosts. Virtual hosting can be set up in the Cloud as well as at customers’ premises.