Run and Optimise
Keep your service healthy, available, and continuously improving.
What this service is
Going live is not the finish line. For critical or public facing services, it's the beginning of a long-term commitment to keeping them up, secure, and getting better.
Left without active care, services accumulate problems:
- Technical debt builds
- Security configurations drift
- Performance degrades
- Small issues become large ones
- Fails to deliver against changing requirements
The clients we work with can't afford that trajectory. The services are too important, too visible, and too depended upon.
Run and Optimise is CDS's managed service: ITIL-certified. ISO 20000:2018 accredited. 2nd and 3rd line application support backed by the same engineering depth that built the service.
We're not a first-line contact centre service desk - that's a different kind of work and not where we play. We're the expert layer: skilled triage, application-level resolution, proactive monitoring, and continuous improvement.
What we do
Incident management and application support
ITIL-based incident management across all tiers. Every ticket gets a unique reference, priority based on impact and urgency, and is actively managed through to resolution. Our resolver groups are engineers, not just process-followers. When a P1 comes in, the people responding understand the platform at an engineering level.
Proactive monitoring and event management
Detection of deviations from baseline before they become incidents. Monitoring thresholds set during service transition, maintained and refined over time. We look for problems before clients notice them.
Change and release management
A formal Change Advisory Board process that minimises deployment risk. Every change is assessed, approved, and tracked. Release pipelines and CI/CD tooling where appropriate. Configuration management that keeps the CMDB current.
Security and vulnerability management
Vulnerability scanning on a cadence aligned to the service tier. Ongoing Cloudflare management - WAF rule updates, configuration tuning, security posture maintenance - for Cloudflare-hosted services. Annual penetration testing through CREST or CHECK-accredited providers. Remediation guidance and support following findings.
Hosting and infrastructure management
For clients where CDS manages the hosting environment - Azure or cloud infrastructure operational status monitoring, licence and certificate management, backup management, and disaster recovery testing. Active-DR platform design where availability requirements demand it.
Continual service improvement
Structured identification and implementation of improvements to the service, the platform, and the way we work together. Formalised through service reviews and tracked through the ITSM system. Not just keeping things running, but making them better over time.
High-stakes event cover
Dedicated support during peak periods, major events, or operational moments where the standard on-call model isn't enough. Evidenced across sporting weekends, national travel disruption events, and major policing operations.
Service delivery management
Service Delivery Managers responsible for SLA compliance, client relationship, and reporting. Monthly reviews at Gold and Silver tier. Quarterly at Bronze. A single point of contact between CDS and the client.
How it's structured
A Run and Optimise package is constructed from three dimensions:
Capabilities
The service components the client needs, selected from the menu above.
Tier
Gold, Silver, or Bronze. The tier sets SLA commitments, response and resolution times, reporting cadence, and the depth of proactive management.
Scale
The expected volume across those capabilities, which drives the resourcing model.
Why build with CDS?
Most managed service providers bring either process rigour or technical depth. CDS brings both. Our ITIL practice is ISO 20000:2018 certified and staffed by ITIL-qualified personnel. The resolver groups behind it are the same engineers who build at national scale.
For clients who built with CDS, there's an additional advantage: the team running the service is the team that built it. That institutional knowledge - what the system does under load, how the integrations behave, where the failure modes are - is the difference between a managed service that anticipates problems and one that just responds to them.
See our proof
We work with clients across central government, emergency services, health, financial services and national-scale consumer digital. The common thread is that the services they run can't afford to fail.
Single Online Home
24/7 managed service for a national policing platform serving 43 forces. 100% uptime since 2022. 50 million malicious requests absorbed monthly. Zero service impact.
National Rail Enquiries
ITIL managed service at extreme scale. 99.99% availability. 227 million requests during the 2022 rail strikes handled with negligible impact on response times.
Resilience Direct
Supporting the UK's resilience community continuously since 2013. Used during the Manchester bombing, London Bridge attack, and hundreds of other major incidents.
Speak to our experts
Get in touch with our team today to see how we can help your organisation.
