Anonymised summaries of representative engagements. Client names are withheld — for institutions in this sector, discretion about their infrastructure is part of what they are buying.
Monitoring and dashboards across a national branch network
The challenge
Thousands of servers, network devices and branch systems with no unified visibility. Outages were typically reported by branch staff rather than detected centrally, and executive reporting on IT availability was assembled manually each month.
What we did
- Zabbix deployed on dedicated servers inside the bank’s intranet, with proxies at each regional site so monitoring survived WAN interruption
- Templates and thresholds baselined against observed behaviour rather than defaults, with dependency rules to suppress alert storms
- Grafana dashboards built separately for the NOC, for infrastructure teams and for executive reporting
- Alerts integrated with the service desk so every incident became an assigned, SLA-tracked ticket
Outcome
- Incidents detected centrally before branch escalation in the large majority of cases
- Executive availability reporting produced from live data instead of manual compilation
- A single escalation matrix replacing informal, individual notification arrangements
Asset and licence control across a multi-branch insurer
The challenge
IT assets were tracked in departmental spreadsheets that diverged from reality within weeks. Audit preparation consumed significant staff time each cycle, and software licence positions could not be stated with confidence.
What we did
- GLPI deployed on virtual machines inside the company’s network
- Active Directory integration for authentication and organisational structure
- Agent-based and network inventory so the asset register refreshes itself
- Licence, contract and warranty tracking with expiry alerting
- Official plugins configured for compliance reporting rather than left at defaults
Outcome
- A single asset register covering all branches, maintained automatically
- Audit preparation reduced from a manual exercise to a report
- Licence renewal and warranty expiry surfaced as scheduled tickets rather than surprises
Defect traceability for a regional bank’s IT department
The challenge
Defects were tracked informally across email and spreadsheets. There was no auditable lifecycle from report to fix to verification, which became a problem when internal audit asked for one.
What we did
- MantisBT deployed on the bank’s intranet
- Workflow customised to the bank’s defect lifecycle, with required fields at each transition
- Project-level permissions separating internal and vendor-reported issues
- Reporting plugins configured for defect ageing and per-release quality
Outcome
- Every defect carrying a complete, auditable lifecycle record
- Verification made an explicit workflow step rather than an assumption
- Release quality reporting available without manual collation
Database resilience for a financial services provider
The challenge
Production databases had backups configured but no documented restore test, no defined recovery objectives, and a replica that had never been failed over to.
What we did
- Recovery point and recovery time objectives defined with the business and signed off
- Replication topology reviewed and rebuilt to meet the agreed objectives
- Controlled failover exercises run and timed, with findings documented
- Backup automated, encrypted and monitored, with failures alerting the same night
- Scheduled restore drills established as a recurring, evidenced activity
Outcome
- Recovery time changed from an estimate to a measured number
- Failover demonstrated under controlled conditions rather than assumed
- Backup failure detected within hours instead of at the next audit
A note on figures. We have deliberately not attached percentage improvements to these summaries. Numbers of that kind are easy to write and difficult to substantiate, and the institutions we work with tend to ask how they were measured. Where a specific outcome was measured in an engagement, we are happy to discuss it directly with the client’s reference permission.