In this first article in an ongoing series, we introduce the DataBank Customer Portal and describe how it helps our customers gain self-service control and complete visibility into their entire infrastructure. This article highlights the Portal’s extensive capabilities—and how they help customers improve day-to-day management. Stay tuned for additional articles, or learn more about the DataBank Customer Portal now.

Whether you rely on DataBank for colocation, cloud, security, or managed services, the DataBank Customer Portal is a valuable resource that provides increased visibility, convenience, and control over all aspects of your DataBank infrastructure.

We’re proud of the Customer Portal because it is so different from other customer portals or offerings in the market. (After their first look at the portal, our customers consistently tell us they haven’t seen anything like this anywhere else.) We started the process by collecting real-world feedback from our customers and custom-built the portal to make sure it continues to deliver all of the capabilities any company requires.

We chose not to use off-the-shelf software that couldn’t meet our high expectations. Instead, we built the portal from the ground up, complete with an official product roadmap, ongoing iterations based on new requests, and an agile software development methodology to make sure we deliver real business value for our customers.

Today, the Customer Portal gives you everything you need to see your entire environment and manage virtually every part of your infrastructure. This includes areas such as physical access, power use, network performance, resource management, security details, compliance, and reporting.

Customer portals increase service transparency, with 70% of users reporting faster issue resolution and better resource management. Customer portals are being enhanced into insight hubs with real-time analytics on usage, predictive consumption alerts, and AI-based optimization recommendations for tenants and operators.

To learn more, we created this tutorial series, where each article will highlight a different portion of the Customer Portal and describe the many benefits it provides. First up: support

Support Capabilities: Self-Service Access and Control

The support section of the portal is the area that DataBank customers visit the most. They can open tickets, review the status of open tickets, and search all of their ticket history, book conference rooms, manage on-site deliveries, and even request help for remote hands, which are available at all DataBank data centers.

Customers can look at the past history associated with any ticket or see various details (e.g., troubleshooting steps, resolution process, etc.). They can also subscribe themselves or other authorized users to any given ticket. However, if they want to communicate important details to non-authorized users, for example, to notify staff about a particular delivery, they can add them to the ticket email notifications. Those users will receive the ticket updates by email and can respond to those emails, which will add their comments to the ticket history, but they won’t be able to access sensitive data such as access credentials or network IPs.

While we will still perform these same functions for any DataBank customer, the visibility and self-service access give them even more control over their DataBank environment.

To learn more, stay tuned for future articles in this series or download the DataBank Customer Portal Overview today.