Econocom uses Centreon monitoring to guarantee client infrastructure compliance

The Econocom project in a nutshell: Providing new services and ensuring compliance

Econcom business objectives:

• Acquire a powerful reporting tool capable of meeting our ISO 27001 certification requirements and PSF* accreditation
• Enhancing ITOps monitoring and service quality
• Grant access to monitoring insights to non-IT users 

*An official business status in Luxembourg law, the Professional of the financial sector status (PSF) certifies a finance sector professional and guarantees the secure and confidential processing of the data. 

IT objectives:

• Monitoring infrastructure and PSF* information systems as well as client environments with a comprehensive tool.
• Integrate data from ITSM tools.
• Benefit from MSP-friendly technical and financial options.

  *An official business status in Luxembourg law, the Professional of the financial sector status (PSF) certifies a finance sector professional and guarantees the secure and confidential processing of the data. 

Main benefits:

• Strengthens the technical and business management of client accounts using KPIs set in Centreon.
• Monitoring beyond the technical aspects, for a business perspective.
• New value adding services extended to clients through dedicated dashboards.
• Provides instant visibility on clients’ systems, for any infrastructure deployment.
• Improves proactivity and enables more targeted interventions, for more efficacy.
• Consistent regulatory compliance monitoring.
• MSP-tailored flexible licensing options, both for technical and financial requirements, as capabilities scale up.

The full story

Econocom is a European group that makes digital transformation happen for companies and public organizations. The MSP selected a Centreon platform to monitor their private cloud service hosted in Luxembourg. This proved to be a smart choice as much from a technical standpoint as business-wise. The solution covers both Econocom PSF and their clients’ monitoring needs, from a single console and comes with a licensing model tailored to the needs of MSPs. As a result, the company strengthened service quality and regulatory compliance while offering clients new value-adding services.

Econocom: “Welcome to the era of userization”

Econocom is a European group that makes digital transformation happen for companies and public organizations. The company counts 10,300 employees in 18 countries with revenues topping 3 billion euros. As an MSP based in Luxembourg, its PSF division, provides IT services as well as a full range of hosting options to local businesses. The division holds a Luxembourg-specific certification called PSF (Professionals of the financial sector), which is an official business status in Luxembourg law recognizing a finance sector professional and guaranteeing secure and confidential data hosting. The division is also ISO 27001 (the international security standard for information systems), which guarantees a high level of security.

“We work closely with Big 4 companies as well as other key financial players in the Luxembourg market. But the other half of our client portfolio belongs to the industrial sector, are local businesses or subsidiaries of large international groups,” explains François Philippo, Datacenter Specialist at Econocom. “We provide a comprehensive hosting solution, aligned with our clients’ needs for optimal support as they migrate to a tailor-made cloud that complies with their regulatory obligations.”

Business objective: Help manage regulatory compliance risk with a hybrid hosting model and superior reporting capabilities

A portion of Econocom PSF’s clients are financial institutions, and therefore operate in a regulated environment. Econocom’s teams have a deep knowledge of regulatory requirements and can build hybrid environments, limiting compliance risks for their Luxembourg operations. Sébastien Missenard, Director of Econocom PSF Division explains: 

Econocom classifies and manages data risks, supporting their clients’ compliance to their Luxembourg-specific obligations. This implies that the data is hosted locally and that it can be managed by experts who are themselves PSF-certified.

“Our PSF Luxembourg (Professionals of the Financial Sector) accreditation and ISO 27001 certification are important for clients to feel they’re in trustable hands,” explains Sébastien Missenard. “These credentials entail that we can provide superior event tracing and reporting capabilities. It includes obviously compliance to SLAs and to internal and external audit obligations. Through these specialized services, we can validate the compliance of our service delivery. Our collaboration with Centreon stems from this commitment to compliance.“

ITOM objective: Deploying a single monitoring tool tailored to the specific needs of an MSP to enhance the service portfolio

The collaboration with Centreon began in 2017. At the time, the Econocom PSF team was looking for a solution that could strengthen service quality and make them more proactive with clients. Achieving this required the adoption of new tools, including a brand-new monitoring platform to empower ITOps teams. “We needed a solution which could cover a large spectrum of capabilities, including addressing business issues and generating advance reporting, while being accessible to the greatest number of users,” recalls François Philippo.

They did not want a solution that only a handful code masters could understand. In addition, the solution needed to be powerful and scalable in terms of reporting, to ramp up as demand increased.

These were the criteria that led to Centreon, with well-defined objectives:

• Monitor all the Econocom multisite infrastructure.
• Monitor all new customers environment, generating and sharing easily accessible dashboards.
• Provide additional reporting to all clients after consolidation of data from the ITSM platform.

The project: Integrating the Centreon monitoring platform as an Econocloud standard offer

Monitoring events is now a critical part of MSP activity. As Econocom PSF serves a number of regulated companies, two synchronized data centers offer a superior level of availability. Managing such installations requires accurate and real-time data from the monitoring platform. Centreon’s flexible and holistic approach meets these requirements as well as the need to monitor hybrid architectures.

The team leverages all of the Centreon platform functionalities, in particular the Plugin Packs (or connectors), strong allies in meeting rising expectations for interoperability and a more connected monitoring experience.  It’s a reality François Philippo is well aware of:

“We are integrating more and more databases (like Oracle for example) and we are also interfacing Centreon to tools like IBM’s PowerSystem for core banking solutions under AS400. We have also created a portal that consolidates all Centreon-collected information.”

A win-win proposition: a single platform, a larger scope, value-added services for clients and guaranteed compliance. 

Adopting the Centreon monitoring platform allowed to centralize monitoring and significantly extend its scope. With the move from Nagios to Centreon, monitoring was extended to all Econocom and client environments. IT and non-IT stakeholders can now access monitoring data to inform capacity planning or manage client accounts.

The Centreon platform also enabled rigorous reporting (capacity planning, IT health, daily checks, service and infrastructure status) as well as reporting at the MSP-level that generate additional value. Sébastien Missenard highlights:

High availability is an integral part of the requirements for the PSF designation. Failure to comply with SLAs, in the event of unavailability, exposes to financial penalties. And the principle applies to non-regulated organizations as well. One Econocom client is a supermarket chain which monitors all its connected refrigerators. Even the slightest anomaly in IoT monitoring can trigger serious consequences and disrupt the cold chain, which would have a direct impact on consumer health.

The project team and the managed services team, in all 12 people, use Centreon on a daily basis. Beyond this core group, all Econocom client teams also access the integrated monitoring platform which is a standard part of the Econocloud hosting and managed services offer. This is in fact one of the most tangible benefits of a standard Centreon deployment: the integration of new services through the widespread use of monitoring and dedicated dashboards.  

Moving forward: Fast-paced growth meets technical and licensing scalability, helping MSPs face new challenges

Econocom’s strategy is evolving rapidly. Cloud platforms and services for the entire Benelux region are now hosted by the Luxembourg division, making Econocom PSF a hub for cloud expertise in the north-western part of Europe. The company will likely need to scale fast – requiring just-in-time flexibility in terms of licensing. And this is where Centreon adds even more value. Econocom adopted the Centreon MSP Edition, which is designed to meet exactly the challenges MSPs face. “This is not just about managing budgets, we’re also aiming to become a model MSP – a center of expertise providing extended reporting services,” explains Sébastien Missenard. 

The MSP is on a well-defined path. Teams are building on their expertise with the objective to amplify business workflow and usage monitoring.