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Why ZenGuard Is the Right Choice to Carry Your Analytics Environment into the Future

Data Management

Fritz Lehman

,

Nick Welke

03/08/2023

Hero

Success in a digital-first economy depends on trusting your data and its conclusions. However, ensuring your analytics environment remains optimized to serve your business goals is often like aiming at a moving target. The moment you and your team have all the moving parts in order is the same moment a new variable arrives to upend all your hard work.

Remaining current with every best practice for your analytics environment may be difficult, but that’s hardly an excuse when the health of your business is at stake. If you don’t have the resources to ensure your data is reliable and secure, your organization can’t afford to wait for an imaginary better time to find a solution. You need expert assistance — and fast.

ZenGuard Is the Way Forward for Institutions Needing a Lift with Analytics Tools

A customizable managed service program, ZenGuard offers more than much-needed technical support for your data tools. It’s a means to augment your organization with dedicated consultants who manage the infrastructure of your analytics environment.

Along with ZenGuard’s capacity to maintain your on-prem SAS products and open source applications, the service incorporates support for hosted services in the cloud. Whether your system uses AWS, Microsoft’s Azure, or Google Cloud Platform, ZenGuard will oversee and optimize your components.

Why ZenGuard Is the Right Choice for Organizations of All Sizes

Under a ZenGuard support plan, you gain a dedicated, two-person team who will keep your environment running smoothly and securely. This continuity allows us to develop a familiarity with your business and its needs. From there, your ZenGuard team will provide support that includes the following areas:

  • Identify performance bottlenecks and system problems.
  • Troubleshoot and identify issues before they cause system downtime.
  • Drive toward continuous improvement through trend analysis, capacity planning, and best practice advice

Your analytics platform may be running well now, but all enterprise software systems require consistent care. Your analysts may be well-trained and experienced, but they can’t also function as administrators. The ability to generate the reports your business needs is a different skill set from identifying and repairing system issues. 

Industries as varied as finance, insurance, gaming, manufacturing, and health care all rely on the ability to securely capture and draw conclusions from data. To ensure your analytics environment is sustainable, you need the flexible, dedicated support ZenGuard provides.

Managed Support Offers Value and Flexibility

When your organization relies on SAS for its analytics environment, qualified admin specialists are difficult to find. Plus, they’re expensive to hire. ZenGuard enables your organization to sidestep the stress of searching for the people you need.

In a volatile climate when every organization must consider its headcount, ZenGuard avoids impacting your budget with the costs of a full-time hire. But the value of ZenGuard is equally apparent in its flexibility.

Depending on your business goals, you can choose a 6- or 12-month support contract for the hours you need most. Whether your environment needs additional care during standard working hours, after hours, or 24/7, ZenGuard offers support that suits your organization. When working with an experienced IT partner, you can better identify the appropriate amount of service for your environment.

Moving to the Cloud Is Manageable With ZenGuard

Modernization is a long, complex, and essential undertaking for any business looking to remain competitive. While migrating to the cloud marks a daunting step on that journey, ZenGuard enables you to smooth that transition for your organization.

As a ZenGuard customer with an on-prem SAS environment, you have the benefit of support from SAS partners who are extensively experienced with cloud operations. These skills allow us to create a proof of concept for the benefits of a migration before your organization starts the process. Using a concrete set of calculations that apply to a specific part of your business, we can transition one aspect of your SAS analytics environment to the cloud. Then we demonstrate its functionality and its benefits to your team.

At the same time, your ZenGuard team is also providing regular support for your existing analytics processes. But by illustrating the early benefits of migrating to the cloud, you gain the organizational buy-in required for a successful modernization initiative. 

ZenGuard doesn’t just enable your organization to maximize the value of its current analytics processes. It leaves your organization better positioned for the future by revealing how to navigate complex, much-needed milestones such as a cloud migration

Whatever enhancements your environment needs to move your business forward, your ZenGuard team are vital collaborators on a plan to take you there.

ZenGuard Offers Stability and Security for Today — and Tomorrow

Ensuring that your analytics environment is stable and up-to-date is  critical to prevent outages and protect performance. But more importantly, it provides the greatest defense against security breaches at a pivotal time for all industries.

Not long ago, the log4j security vulnerability was identified as the biggest data security breach of the past 100 years. The FTC warned every company to remediate the issue in January 2022. Still, many organizations have not taken the right steps to protect their data and their customers.

One of the challenges of the log4j vulnerability wasn’t just identifying its impact on analytics platforms. In this case, IBM issued a security bulletin that outlined an issue with their servers used with SAS. That knowledge, plus our experience, allowed us to recognize security patches needed to incorporate multiple sources to remediate the log4 issues.

Every organization with a ZenGuard support plan benefited from that thousand foot view in managing their data in a security crisis. When the next threat to your business is uncovered, do you want to be on your own working to protect your system? Or would your organization be better served with additional guards at the door?

If the security and stability of your analytics environment is a concern, we should talk about how ZenGuard will work for you. 

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