The Corporation of the Council of Ministers of Education, Canada (“CCMEC”) maintains a staff of 70–75 people who rely on a mostly cloud-based Microsoft-centric IT infrastructure. Although a physical office is maintained in mid-town Toronto, most staff work remotely on CCMEC-issued endpoints that are managed centrally by a Managed Services Provider (MSP) and provide access to key resources such as Microsoft 365, SharePoint, Exchange, Azure Files, Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD), and others. Backups are managed natively in Azure and Microsoft 365, with additional Microsoft 365 redundancy provided by Veeam, utilizing forever retention.
Because CCMEC does not maintain a multi-disciplinary IT support team of its own, it must rely on Managed Services and Support providers to sustain its IT activities, support its user base, and address emerging needs as they arise.
The objective of the RFP is to select an ISO-certified Proponent with proven experience in providing Managed Services and Support to small and midsize businesses (SMBs) and solid expertise in both Microsoft and Oracle environments. The Proponent must have a minimum of five (5) years' experience in similar work and demonstrate the ability to assign certified SMEs in the relevant fields.
The Services’ key objectives are:
- Continuous and reliable delivery of client IT services – Provide network, endpoint, and hosted environment surveillance, security, maintenance, patching, lifecycle management and evolution;
- Incident prevention and remediation – Ensure proactive monitoring, optimization, and intervention to preempt or mitigate the impact of cyber threats and hardware/software failures, and provide detailed reporting and preventative policy adaptation following an incident;
- Change management – Handle IT environment enhancements, migrations, patches, upgrades, and hardware/software updates;
- Improvement of IT services over time – Continuously and proactively seek out optimization of IT resources to maximize achievable benefits within the client’s financial resource envelope;
- Resilience – Provision all client policies, procedures, workflows, and assets with security, privacy, and robust performance indicators in mind;
- Adherence to best practices – Execute all work according to industry standards and best practices and alert the client to the discovery of non-compliant systems, configurations, and policies.
