Managed IT Services

General Info

American Frontier is capable of managing all of your standard IT systems. Managed IT services may be performed on-site, off-site, or a combination. All managed services can be tailored to meet the individual needs of each customer, including adherence to internal policies and procedures, to aide in compliance initiatives. Services are available at hourly rates, per incident rates, or flat rates, to best fit your needs.

Managed Active Directory and Email

American Frontier can manage your Microsoft Active Directory and Email (Exchange) environments. Operations performed during this service include:

• Full user account maintenance, including Active Directory creations, deletions, and modifications, user profile creation, user home directories, user permissions, and group memberships.
• Full mailbox maintenance, including creations, deletions, and modifications, group/list memberships, user permissions.
• Active Directory group maintenance, including creations, deletions, and modifications, membership operations and group permissions.
• Exchange Group/List maintenance, including creations, deletions, and modifications, membership operations, and permissions.
• Group policy maintenance, including creations, deletions, and modifications to multiple policies, and policy deployment.
• Active Directory structural maintenance including the creation, deletion, and modification of organizational units and other containers.
• Management and maintenance of anti-spam solutions
• Management and maintenance of email anti-virus solutions
• Management and maintenance of email archival/search solutions
• Optional Maintenance of Active Directory and Exchange servers including patch management, monitoring, and backup/recovery.

Managed Security Appliances

American Frontier can manage a variety of security appliances including routers, network firewalls, web application firewalls, intrusion detection/prevention systems, anti-virus appliances, content filtering appliances, wireless access points, SOHO router/firewall combination devices, layer-3 switches, VPN appliances, and more. American Frontier supports the full line of products from Cisco Systems. Select products from Juniper, F5, Barracuda, Dell, SonicWall and Watchguard are also supported. Additionally, the full range of SOHO-type security devices from manufacturers such as Linksys (Cisco), D-Link, Netgear, etc. can also be supported, although these devices may lack many features.

Management of security appliances includes, but is not limited to:

• Creation, deletion, and modification of access control lists (or equivalent)
• Management of encryption services, including VPN and wireless encryption
• Regular review of security logs
• Optional device maintenance including patching, monitoring, and backup/recovery of configurations.

Patch management

American Frontier can manage the patching and updating of servers, workstations, security appliances and various devices. All Windows operating systems from Windows XP onward are supported. All RPM-based Linux distributions are supported. Supported security appliances are described above. Supported telephony products are described below.

Patches may be obtained directly from the vendor, but internal patch servers are highly recommended to speed patch deployment and aide reporting and verification. Current maintenance agreements and/or patching licenses are required for all commercial products. Patching operations can be tailored for the customer's requirements including patch testing, deployment timeframes, and deployment timing.

Telephony

American Frontier supports VOIP-based terminals and terminal adapters from from Aastra, Grandstream, Cisco, Linksys, and Polycom. We support VOIP PBX systems from Barracuda Networks, and the open-source Asterisk community including commercial products based on Asterisk. This support includes:

• Creation, removal, and modification of extensions
• Creation, removal, and modification of voicemail boxes
• Creation, removal, and modification of queues, IVRs, and directories
• Provisioning and deployment of new terminals, and removal of old
• Configuration of call flows
• Configuration of routes and trunks
• Optional updates to terminals and PBX system (see Patch Management)
• Optional system monitoring (see below)
• Optional system backup and recovery (see below)

Critical Infrastructure

American Frontier can aid the customer in the monitoring, maintenance, and repair of critical infrastructure including:

• Racks and rack components
• Temperature / humidity control
• Power distribution
• Uninterruptible Power Supplies
• Backup Generators
• Cable plant

American Frontier will monitor the critical infrastructure to ensure performance. American Frontier maintains a network of providers of electrical, HVAC, cabling, and other services. We will contact and coordinate with our licensed and insured vendors and contractors when necessary to maintain the optimal performance of your infrastructure. We can also coordinate with your own existing vendors. We will manage and oversee all work performed. Where applicable and allowable by law (e.g. rack and rack component installations) work will be performed by American Frontier staff and direct contractors.

Monitoring

The American Frontier monitoring platform is capable of monitoring virtually any network-connected device. Monitoring options start with a basic ICMP/PING and include both agent-less (SNMP) and agent-based solutions. Our primary monitoring servers are located in our Dallas, TX datacenter. Ping tests, content tests, agent-less and agent-based tests will originate from this location. If a customer is unable to provide direct access to systems, American Frontier can deploy a proxy testing server in the customer's environment to handle testing of inaccessible systems and services. Monitoring is automatic, and operates 24x7x365. Alerts are typically sent via email and/or SMS message.

Backup/Recovery

American Frontier can manage your backup and recovery needs, directly on your own hardware, or on our own. These solutions are highly customizable to meet the needs of the customer.

At the most basic level, on the customer's hardware, American Frontier will configure, monitor and maintain the backup hardware and software. This includes scheduling backups, performing restores, and updating software and firmware (see Patch Management).

On our hardware, at the most basic level, the customer may simply obtain storage space from our datacenter or cloud offerings and manage the rest of the process themselves. On the other end of the spectrum, American Frontier can provide a full backup package, including hardware, software, and agents. Backup data can reside locally, be stored in our datacenter or cloud, or both.

Hybrid approaches are also available.