Cisco SMARTnet is the support contract offered by Cisco on their products. There are many Cisco SMARTnet benefits that will improve your network efficiency and provide the assistance your IT teams needs to manage your network properly. In this article, we are explaining some of the key benefits that come from having a SMARTnet subscription and why it’s the best idea to ensure you are always in contract.

Having a Cisco SMARTnet contract makes you eligible for many features and services that are vital for keeping your business network running smoothly and securely. To see what’s available with your Cisco SMARTnet contract, read our last article.

The main reason that customers use SMARTnet is because of the support you get from Cisco’s award-winning technical support team, Cisco TAC. When anything goes wrong, whether it be minor or major, Cisco TAC is available 24/7 to help you resolve your issue as fast as possible.

Let’s imagine your network is down and you have no idea how to resolve the issue. After alerting Cisco TAC, they can pinpoint your issue by using their service coverage information and quickly identify the device which is the culprit. From here they can resolve the issue remotely, instruct you how to resolve it, or in some cases, send an engineer out to you to replace the device with a new one in just two hours!

Having Cisco TAC on your side is vital when it comes to maintaining your network and ensuring it’s performing as it should be.

If you work in IT for a large company, you will know how difficult it is to be certain about which devices are covered. The portal you have access to with your SMARTnet subscription gives you great visibility into your installed base and enables you to ensure that business-critical assets have the required coverage to satisfy business needs and corporate policies.

Within the portal, you can see assistance helping you to determine the proper coverage for your Cisco devices. Regular data collection and customisable reports allow you to manage your installed base and service contracts with ease.

To ensure that your network is always performing optimally and securely you need to stay up to date with the newest information. With a SMARTnet contract, you will automatically receive alerts that affect you and your network. These include actionable security alerts, relevant hardware and software notices, and service availability alerts. These alerts are customisable so you choose which ones you do and don’t want to receive.

Actionable security alerts are extremely important. Security threats are constantly evolving and staying on top of them is the only way you can ensure your network is safe. Cisco makes this easy with the security alerts they regularly send out, so you don’t need to worry. If a new threat is discovered, you’ll receive a message explaining exactly what needs to be done to prevent it from affecting you.

The relevant product notices that you receive relate to updates to products you own and other useful information about new features.

Efficient planning is another of the valuable Cisco SMARTnet benefits. Lifecycle management is an important aspect of network management. By using the portal you can vastly improve your planning abilities and reduce the chance of errors greatly. You can easily see which contracts are coming up for renewal and help you with budget planning.

You will also have visibility into which of your products are approaching end-of-life, end-of-sale, and end-of-support. If people within the company add, move or change anything, you will be able to see a record of all of this.

The process to transition is more simple than you’d imagine. We recommend you start by mapping your current Cisco architecture and getting a clear overview of the used products and services. Then, you can get rid of unused or overlapping products and consider switching to a Cisco Enterprise Agreement. This means you’ve got some cleaning to do! Find out how to get started in our ebook The Big Cisco Clean Up- a guide that helps you create a manageable and cost-effective Cisco environment.