Assessments Services

Past, Present, and Future

Union provides a range of Assessment Services that can be undertaken in isolation or incorporated as part of our Competitive Edge program of business case development. These provide a snap-shot of your current environment and model existing trends and resources to forecast a picture of what the future might look like with the application of a given technology.

Virtualisation Readiness Assessment

Ever wondered whether your server environment was a suitable candidate for virtualisation? Our Virtualisation Readiness Assessment will measure your processor, memory, LAN I/O and disk utilisation over a period of 30 days and tell you exactly that. The process is non-intrusive (no agents), dynamically updated (via our dedicated VRA web portal) and will deliver a set of canned reports that illustrate your candidacy details, potential virtualisation ratios, and cost savings for a range of platform scenarios.

File System Assessment

Your data is typically spread across many systems, has a myriad of different owners (human, logical, and physical), varies in growth rate from application to application, varies in lifecycle usefulness, and is attributed different value sets by different people within your organisational structure. It is imperative therefore to understand its unique demographics in order to plan for the future, reduce waste, and manage risk. Union’s File System Assessment does exactly this. We use a non-intrusive (no agents) tool to map what is going on in order to enable a strategic plan for consolidation, growth, management and protection that is built upon fact.

Commonality Assessment

Lots of your data is duplicated - some estimates suggest up to 50%. Emails containing attachments are filed by the multiple recipients in mail folders or saved on file systems many times over. Similarly revisions of files containing 90% the same content are stored intact and whole because that’s how things have always been done. Copies of entire volumes are made for data protection purposes. These processes and policies, constrained by traditional technology, are an enormous resource and cost burden in storage and backup. Union’s Commonality Assessment measures the levels of duplication in existence within your organisation and provides us with the facts to help build a better way for you to store things.

Email Assessment

Like it or not email is the new filing system. We all do it - in comes a mail whose content you think might be important and you drag and drop it into a mail folder “for later”. This has an enormous impact upon the performance of the mail system and upon your IT organisation’s ability to protect it, maintain its availability, and manage cost. Regulatory and statutory compliance with respect to the retention of “applicable transaction communication” and personal data compounds the problem, as does the need to exploit the intellectual property often contained within email. Union’s Email Assessment establishes the size of your problem, and provides the facts upon which we can recommend a sustainable model that reduces cost and risk whilst optimising email performance and service.

Backup Assessment

Backups never seem to work 100% successfully 100% of the time, and data growth always seems to outpace available backup windows. Union’s Backup Assessment can help you optimise your existing investment as well as plan for the future. We use a non-intrusive (no agents) tool that provides graphical representations of utilisation and performance peaks and troughs, as well as growth trends and media utilisation. By marrying these facts with experience, Union is able to iron out technical problems, optimise your backup’s performance, and help plan a scalable means of data protection for the future.

Security Assessment

Britain’s modern economy is built upon the service industry – information is its lifeblood. This information is presented with data from a multitude of internal and external sources 24x7. Maintaining the integrity and provenance of this data is a huge challenge. Union’s Security Assessment provides you with an indication of your Security posture. This questionnaire based assessment addresses twelve areas of Information Security. Each answer is given a score and each section is measured out of 100. At the end of each section an overall percentage security posture is shown. A report is then compiled highlighting the potential risk areas, the impact they may have on the business and what can be done to mitigate or reduce these risks.