At the end of each year, we like to look back and reflect on the work we did as an organization and the challenges we helped our clients face. Let’s take a look back at 2020; from the launch of Polaris, to COVID-19 support, and becoming one of just a few Oracle Cloud Service Providers, it was a big year for the whole team.
COVID-19 Support
2020 was a year of uncertainty and stress as COVID-19 changed the landscape and put a huge strain on IT environments all around the world. Many organizations ground to a halt as lockdown orders were put into place. As business closed, we began to face our first COVID-19 support challenge: a massive number of unemployment requests.
Nevada DETR Password Reset
During the month of March, Nevada DETR had seen a record number of initial claims for unemployment insurance. As the agency continued to experience high volumes of claims entering their system, they realized they needed to improve their IT infrastructure in order to support unemployment needs. One of the main challenges Nevada DETR faced was password resets, a task that was consuming IT resources that needed to be used for more pressing customer service matters.
In a collaborative effort with Arisant, DETR created a password recovery page. This page was tailored to help users that had an existing account in the system but had forgotten their password or password recovery questions. The password recovery screen is accessed after the filer enters their username on the “Claimant Login” screen. Filers simply click on a link and are then forwarded to the password recovery page. Since going live, this page has helped to ease the burden placed on Nevada DETR’s support staff immensely.
ForgeRock Provisioning System
The next COVID-19 challenge many organizations faced was when restrictions began to ease in late Spring and businesses were allowed to reopen. During this time, organizations were bringing back furloughed employees and hiring new staff. In many cases, these employees needed to be reprovisioned in order to meet identity management SLAs. So, how do you do this without putting a massive burden on your IT staff, who need to be managing other important tasks as the business comes back online?
Arisant determined that ForgeRock could be used to create an automatic provisioning solution. Our Devops team got to work writing an identity provisioning system in ForgeRock that would help onboard over 6,000 employees over the span of just a few weeks. Arisant also wrote another account claiming & password reset tool which would help free up even more IT resources.
Online Account Claiming Tool
As the year progressed, we learned that many school districts would be teaching in part, or completely virtually. This presented another challenge when it came to account claiming. The majority of school districts would be using some form of video conferencing, such as Zoom, which would require students to claim an account. This task is already challenging enough when students are in person, so being virtual due to COVID-19 made it even more difficult for many schools to manage. Arisant developed a highly secure and efficient solution for students to claim accounts online, once again saving IT staff the headache of dealing with these issues manually.
Launch of Polaris
A basic version of our Polaris monitoring tool has been used by our managed services team to monitor our customer’s IT environments for the last several years. This year, we were proud to announce a new version of Polaris which includes metric collection, insightful visualizations, customizable dashboards, advanced analytics, and more was launched as a public facing product. The new version is an extensible platform that can easily be enhanced to monitor the assets in your IT ecosystem.
The new Polaris is more than just a monitoring and alerting tool, it’s a secure and extensible monitoring platform that can be customized to fit your business SLAs and develop custom monitoring. Some of Polaris’ new features include:
- Real Time Monitoring – high-quality system support 24x7x365 for companies that require enhanced coverage and monitoring on-premises and in the cloud.
- Advanced Analytics – superior metric collection allows you to perform advanced diagnostics, capacity planning, forecasting, and trend analysis on all of your systems.
- Insightful Visualizations – With Polaris analyses and dashboards, you can easily visualize collected data to show the health of your environment and help predict future usage for better decision making.
- Noise Reduction & Alert Routing – With noise reduction and alert routing features, you can decide who is alerted and when based on the problem at hand.
- Self Healing and Course Correct – Using principles of cognitive computing to simulate human thought processes and actions, Polaris includes multiple out-of-the-box self-healing capabilities.
- Container Monitoring – Polaris automatically discovers containers as they come and go by continuously following their individual life cycles. Polaris comes with robust and configurable metric aggregations, application log monitoring, alerting and visualization functionality to continuously, reliably collect monitoring data from your containerized apps, non-containerized apps and container hosts in a uniform manner.
Oracle Cloud Service Provider (CSP)
This year Arisant was officially accepted into the Oracle Cloud Service Provider (CSP) partner program. These programs are a part of Oracle’s Modernized Partner Network, which was launched at the start of 2020. In order to be considered for the program, Arisant needed to complete a number of cloud-based qualifiers including earning an Oracle Sell and a Service Expertise in the same product family, demonstrate at least two Managed Service successes, and complete a 3rd party Managed Services Audit. By completing these tasks and being accepted into the CSP program, Arisant has proved that they are a highly capable partner when it comes to Oracle Cloud solutions and Managed Services.
If you are looking for the right partners to deliver Cloud solutions to help your business streamline and grow, look no further. As an Oracle CSP, Arisant has already proven that we have what it takes to move your environment to the Cloud and keep it up and running 24x7x365 thanks to our 100% on shore, ITIL certified Managed Services team. By utilizing our proven “5 Steps to the Cloud” process, we can ensure your business will not miss a beat along the way. From day one architecting and road mapping, to migration and managed services, we will help to streamline your journey to the Cloud. And thanks to our CSPdesignation, Arisant can secure Cloud Credits on your behalf, directly from Oracle so you don’t have to spend an inordinate amount of time understanding and negotiating complex terms and conditions and pricing. From start to finish, working with a Managed Services Expertise partner like Arisant is the way to go when moving to the Cloud.
…
So, as we look back at 2020, we can’t say it went as we planned. Who could have ever predicted something like COVID-19? However, we are happy to have made a difference in the IT space as we helped mitigate the stress a pandemic put on IT teams across the world, we are happy to have launched an incredible in-house monitoring and alerting platform, and we can’t wait to continue our work on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) as a Cloud Services Provider. Here’s to 2021.
