dataSMC

04About

Why us

When it breaks, you make one call.

Your technology comes in pieces, from suppliers who are each good at their part. Outages start between the pieces. We answer for all of it, and it’s easiest to show with one Monday morning.

04.1Monday, 07:40

The tills stop taking cards.

A morning you may recognise. Five suppliers are called, one after another. Each one checks, and each one is right.

  1. Store managerNo card payments, on any till.Down
  2. Payment providerOur platform is up. Check your network.Down for +12 min
  3. Network providerThe line is fine. Check your firewall.Down for +51 min
  4. Firewall vendorNothing is being blocked. Check the tills.Down for +1 h 30
  5. Device supportThe tills are patched and online. Check the cloud.Down for +2 h 08
  6. Cloud providerAll systems operational.Down for +2 h 46
  7. FoundAn expired certificate, on a server that wasn’t in anyone’s contract.Down for +3 h 25
Suppliers called
5
Of them wrong
0
Minutes without a card payment
205

04.2The gap

Everyone owned a piece. Nobody owned the whole.

It isn’t a story about bad suppliers. Each was good at its part, and each part was bought for a good reason.

  1. Payments, looked after by Payment provider
  2. Network, looked after by Network provider
  3. Firewall, looked after by Firewall vendor
  4. Server, looked after by No one
  5. Tills, looked after by Device support
  6. Cloud, looked after by Cloud provider

But a business keeps adding pieces: a second site, a new system, one more provider. The spaces between them grow faster than the pieces do. That’s where outages start, where old accounts outlive the people who had them, and where the backup turns out to have been someone else’s job.

So we made the whole our job.

Your suppliers keep their parts. We don’t have to be the only people working on your technology; we do have to be the ones who see it whole, and answer for it.

  1. Payments, looked after by Payment provider
  2. Network, looked after by Network provider
  3. Firewall, looked after by Firewall vendor
  4. Server, looked after by dataSMC
  5. Tills, looked after by Device support
  6. Cloud, looked after by Cloud provider
dataSMC · answers for all of it

There’s no “not our side”. Every side is ours.

04.3Who we are

One team, six disciplines, no vendor to push.

Between them, the people who pick up cover every part of your environment. What they recommend depends on your business, not on a product.

Who picks up

How we’re set up

  • Not tied to a vendor.We recommend on fit. We would rather configure what you already own properly than sell you something new.
  • A named team.The people who answer already know your environment, so nothing has to be explained twice at 07:40.
  • Beside your IT team, or as it.We take on what your people don’t have the time or the depth for. If you have no IT team, we can be it.
  • You keep everything.Documentation, configurations and access stay yours. If we stopped tomorrow, you would still have the map.

04.4The first call

It starts with a sentence like one of these.

If one of them has been said in your business lately, that’s the conversation we’re here for.

  1. The person who knows how everything works is leaving.Devices & infrastructure
  2. The auditor asked who has access. Nobody could say.Identity & access
  3. We’re opening a second site in the spring.Network & cloud
  4. Nobody’s sure where the customer data lives.Data protection & governance
  5. We get so many alerts, we’ve stopped reading them.Monitoring & response
  6. The insurer sent a questionnaire we can’t answer.Compliance & resilience
  7. Our supplier says it’s not on their side.All six services

04.5The point

Quiet is the point.

The best week we can give you is one where nothing happens: no outage, no scramble, nobody asking whose side it’s on. You won’t see most of what we do. That’s how you’ll know it works.

It’s in the name. The data comes first, in lowercase, because it’s yours. The Security, Management and Control of everything it runs through is ours.