At Cyber Advisors, we believe the Primary Engineer is one of the most crucial roles we use so you have a great experience with our Managed IT Services. Yet, the value of having a Primary Engineer working with you is not always well understood before a Managed IT Services agreement begins. There are other Managed IT Service Providers that do not provide a dedicated Engineer-level resource to their customers. Instead, they provide a technician who is ready to serve when they are available, which may be a person the customer has never seen before. Without a complete understanding of their role and their value, the significance of the Primary Engineer may be overlooked.
We assign a Primary Engineer to each new customer. The hard part about assigning an Engineer is knowing how many hours they will need to spend with each customer per month – this is where most other Managed IT Providers fail. They assign a junior-level network technician to visit a customer once per month or once per quarter and run through a template-based checklist of maintenance items and then leave for the next customer to do the same thing. The problem with this is that every company is unique and has different people, processes, and technology infrastructure running their business. Every company has a different culture and a different way of getting things done. And every company needs an IT leader who is a senior-level IT expert. At Cyber Advisors, this is the Primary Engineer role.
The value from the Primary Engineer comes from their ability to be comfortable with complex network design, heavy virtualized environments, cloud workloads, backup and disaster recovery solutions, security tools and appliances, and work well with third party vendors. These IT professionals are industry certified in a broad portfolio of infrastructure technologies and have a network of Subject Matter Experts, Solutions Architects, and Project Engineers for handling the most complex problems. The Primary Engineer is well versed not only in technology, but how to communicate and translate technology to business and IT stakeholders alike. They are technology minded and customer service oriented with strong business acumen. This is important because the Primary Engineer has such a crucial impact on company culture.
Your company culture is your secret sauce and a vital part of your success. The value in having an onsite primary engineer is that they become indoctrinated into your company culture. They get to know your people, your people get to know them, and they become an extension of your team. Trust is built and carried over many years to foster a great relationship which can result in better communication and productivity. The primary engineer is responsible for meeting with you and discussing your goals and objectives, learning where they would be most effectively applied, and provide recommendations based on their experience in complex environments. The primary engineer ensures existing technology is working in concert with today’s demands and helps pave the path for a roadmap that aligns to business goals for the future. This is in-essence adding an IT person to your staff at a fraction of the cost.
Where Cyber Advisors further differentiates itself is by its assignment of not only one Primary Engineer, but also a Secondary Engineer. We do this because we believe that redundancy is important. If one of our Engineers gets a promotion, or wins the lottery, we need another person who is already familiar with the environment to step in as a Primary Engineer. This way, we are able to capture tacit knowledge of the environment and mitigate risk.