Plymouth University aims to ensure its IT services are available 24/7 for students after awarding a contract to monitoring specialist Aurora365.
The deal will see Aurora365 provide uptime assurance for the university's extensive estate of IT servers and web applications, which are critical in supporting its 30,000 students in their everyday work.
The company will deliver support from its UK-based network operation centre team, which is open round the clock 365 days a year, and it claims the centre will both eliminate downtime and improve the IT experiences of students and faculty members.
The deal is an extension of the university's 2013 Aurora365 deployment to provide managed service assurance for the uptime and performance of its Cisco network.
Gary Bayliss, head of service management at Plymouth University, said: "As the results from Aurora365 have been so impressive to date it makes complete business and financial sense to extend the deployment to include our servers and web estate, and we're looking forward to realising similar uptime benefits to drive our 99.97 per cent SLA.
"At Plymouth we're committed to a cycle of continuous service improvement of our major IT estate, server and web applications clearly being a critical part of our offering.
"Working with Aurora365 gives us not only the reassurance of greater uptime and cost-effective performance, but we also benefit from the flexibility that the Aurora365 team offers in terms of fine-tuning their service proposition and integrating with our own internal capabilities and ambitions."
The university decided to grant Aurora365 the web applications and servers support contract after being impressed with the way the firm resolved teething issues following the launch of a new wireless service for students in 2013.
The launch of Meraki's wireless capability saw performance and availability suffer in the university's wider Cisco estate, but Aurora365 was able to pinpoint the problem, said Denis Mills, operations and maintenance manager at Plymouth.
"Plymouth University has a sizeable Cisco network which when combined with other technologies from the likes of Meraki can make debugging challenging," said Mills.
"Technology aside, having an expert team to help diagnose a fault in the needle in the haystack scenario that was presented was a great help for us to rapidly determine root cause and define countermeasures to get the service back to where it needed to be."
