“We must therefore ensure a high level of IT service delivery, a rigorous level of security, and guarantee our clients easy access to visualize their managed services, as their operational excellence, business results and reputation depend directly on the quality of the IT services they delegate to us.” – Morgan Berton, Head of Monitoring at Hub One.
As a subsidiary of the ADP group (Aéroports de Paris), Hub One is a digital technology operator for businesses and public organizations. As a key player of the digital transformation in complex environments, Hub One offers value-added services based on their expertise in these key areas: broadband connectivity, traceability, and mobility business solutions, IoT in an industrial environment, and cybersecurity.
With over 10 regional branches and 550 employees, Hub One draws on their airport experience to provide tailor-made solutions to the critical real-time operational needs of key accounts, SMEs and public organizations. Their clients are companies operating in the Roissy, Orly and Le Bourget airport hubs, France’s largest, including state-owned services, airlines, car rental companies, distribution companies, such as sales outlets operating in airport areas, and world-class operators in airport services (freight handling, ground handling and airport equipment maintenance services). Hub One also serves clients outside airport areas, operating in the logistics, industrial, distribution, catering services, and public sectors.
The company’s IT department manages high stakes issues in infrastructure security – the company is ISO/IEC 27001-certified for their telecom services and their own high-availability IT system supporting MSP services. With a core business entirely dependent on IT, Hub One is now relying on Centreon monitoring to guarantee the quality and performance of managed services delivered to clients.
The project in a few words
Business Challenges
- Support the business’s growth ambitions
- Support clients in their digitization projects
- Meet the precise needs of complex organizations
- Guarantee the highest level of quality for managed services
ITOM Challenges
- High availability: guarantee high availability of Hub One infrastructure supporting managed services
- Security: maintain a high level of security for infrastructure and services – the company is ISO/IEC 27001 certified for their telecom and information security management services, and their quality management system is ISO 9001-certified.
- Visibility: have a clear view on the network’s health status and the performance level of the services delivered to internal and external clients
- Adaptability: track and adapt capabilities
Main Benefits
- Ensure compliance with contractual SLAs
- Reduce incident detection times and MTTR
- Improve customer experience
Business challenges: providing high-level quality IT services to support business results and company reputation
A long-standing subsidiary of ADP specializing in telecom, Hub One has diversified operations over the years. “With the acquisition of specialized enterprises such as Oveliane and OïkiaLog, we have been able to expand our range of managed services by integrating cybersecurity, notably with the supply of SOC (Security Operation Center), a genuine cybersecurity control tower enabling us to meet the quality requirements of both mid sized and large enterprises, as well as those of the ANSSI (French National Cybersecurity Agency),relating to organizations providing highly critical services to the nation. We are also involved in IoT deployments, such as occupancy or, temperature sensors, video surveillance, and so on“, explains Skander Bentchicou, project manager in Hub One’s IT department.
Drawing on their airport experience, Hub One provides customized solutions to critical operational issues and the real time needs of organizations with complex architectures. “Our clients are complex organizations with equally complex IT needs. For instance, we may be involved in providing services with sophisticated configurations, such as a secure network, extended virtual networks, internet access for other internal users or their clients, access to the datacenter hosting banking, software, telecom, and other such critical organizational IT services ” explains Morgan Berton, Head of Monitoring at Hub One.
“We must ensure a high level of IT service delivery with a rigorous level of security, and guarantee our clients easy access to visualize their managed services —heir operational excellence, business results and reputation depend directly on the quality of the IT services they delegate to us.”
IT challenges: security and high availability requirements in a context of constant evolution
Hub One sees business and IT issues as two sides of the same coin. The MSP provider needs to satisfy critical requirements in terms of infrastructure high availability and security, while providing sufficient flexibility to support the complex technology needs of equally complex organizations. Concurrently, Hub One’s IT department is responsible for maintaining the health of the network and report on the status and performance level of the services delivered, both internally and externally, to clients.
As Hub One’s IT department uses monitoring to manage both managed-services-dedicated infrastructure and their own IT system, the ISO 27001 certification impacts the entire IT system in terms of security processes. “We have to work on monitoring so that it takes into account every safety rule which has to be complied with. This is actually more of a process, but it has to be controlled and monitored. The ISO 27001 certification opens the door to a number of market opportunities, particularly from public organizations, which would remain inaccessible without it. It is a market differentiator and it’s an important proof point for clients,” says Skander.
Security, high availability, adaptability and visibility are the pillars of Hub One services, a reflection of the critical nature of the services rendered by their core airport client base. “In addition to ADP, which builds, develops and operates airport hubs, our clients are airlines, companies operating in airports and also state-owned utilities operating in constantly changing environments. Our managed services portfolio includes telecoms and is subjected to standardized service levels. Naturally, these services include monitoring as a way of keeping track of delivery levels” says Morgan Berton, Head of Monitoring.
“In an airport, any incident can quickly escalate to a critical point, due to the operational and financial impacts of IT breakdowns and incidents. Every minute a plane is at standstill is extremely expensive. We have an obligation to provide a high level of service. In this context, monitoring is therefore crucial for us to quickly detect degradation or shutdowns and respond promptly.”
The project: replacing obsolete monitoring with a new scalable solution
Previously equipped with an outdated monitoring solution, which had become complex to maintain and which was no longer meeting requirements, the IT department decided to change the solution. “Because we monitor both Hub One’s IT system and our clients’ managed IT services with the same solution, we needed a scalable solution. With Centreon, we can cover our needs for a fragmented architecture, tailored for frequent configuration changes and scalable to our significant growth. As a priority, we have started monitoring the telecom infrastructure used to serve our clients, as well as customer services. We then added office infrastructure,” says Skander Bentchicou who manages the monitoring migration project.
“We chose Centreon for its scalability, its large catalog of packaged connectors which, combined with the open-source plugins we have customized, help us monitor the multiple Hub One technologies. The solution has a good reputation on the market and its open-source base also helps control costs.”
The solution is used by various teams within Hub One. Morgan Berton’s monitoring team provides, maintains and monitors the network and systems throughout the company. “We set up the necessary monitoring, thresholds and alerts, and we forward Centreon’s alerts into a hypervisor which can be accessed by our management teams, who are in charge of level 1 support. They receive the alerts, qualify incidents following the defined procedures and then transmit the information to the relevant teams who take action to resolve the incident. We are Hub One’s control tower.“
Level 2 teams are located in IT Operations. Centreon is used by all internal teams who consult it on a daily basis. IT Operations teams use it for capacity planning, to check equipment and disk space. Centreon is used to monitor every necessary aspect in IT Operations. On the engineering side, teams integrate new customer scopes and meet specific client requirements.
On the Business Lines side, the CSM (Customer Service Management) teams are in direct contact with the clients of managed services and use monitoring. “CSM teams use Centreon’s dashboards, maps and reports to manage customer relations on a daily basis. Dashboards and maps are used to monitor the availability and performance of services and reports are used as a baseline for discussion during monthly meetings with the clients,” says Morgan Berton.
“Between the IT department project teams, the management teams based in Portugal, the IT Operations team, the team monitoring office equipment, the application managers, the teams in charge of Customer Service Management and Top Management who oversee the effective operation of infrastructure and applications, there are over a hundred people internally who use or consult the Centreon monitoring platform, and this number is bound to increase.”
The benefits: monitoring to improve customer experience
Migrating to Centreon is already proving beneficial on many levels for Hub One. IT teams have gained visibility on the health status of infrastructure dedicated to managed service activities. “We now benefit from having a robust, reliable solution providing greater visibility and helping us quickly detect and deal with internal issues and our clients’ issues,” says Skander Bentchicou, project manager in Hub One’s IT department.
At the same time, the teams in charge of CSM have greater visibility on their clients’ IT scopes. They can pass on this visibility to their clients, since Hub One has set up a client portal with increasing interactions with tools and applications used internally, while maintaining a high level of security. “Monitoring KPIs relate to the availability and performance of equipment and monitoring bandwidth specifically enables CSM teams to track client consumption levels. This helps Hub One adjust the solutions provided to their clients and offer the best-suited services for their needs,” says Morgan Berton, head of monitoring.
By putting Centreon monitoring at the heart of its managed services activities, Hub One is able to guarantee the best experience for its clients and its clients’ clients. Hub One teams actually consider that the level of criticality of monitoring is comparable to the level of criticality of the services delivered to their clients. “If monitoring fails, we cannot guarantee that the service is running. It is actually just as impactful as if the client service itself wasn’t working. There have been cases of aircraft not being able to land due to IT failure with huge operational and financial costs, not to mention the business’s reputation. To take another example, if a retail client suffers an IT failure due to an Internet failure, the connection with the cash register software will be lost. The outlet will be unable to cash in customers, and customers at the outlet will experience a degraded customer experience with a direct effect on business results and brand reputation,” says Morgan.
“Thanks to Centreon’s dashboards and cockpits, which can be accessed via an entirely secure SaaS portal, our clients have greater visibility on their equipment and network. The benefit for Hub One is that Centreon ensures we are reactive in case of an incident or a downgrade in the levels of IT performance, resulting in a higher control of the service levels we contractually offer our clients. Centreon really helps us improve customer experience.”
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