Leveraging Outsourced IT Services for Business

Outsourced IT Services give you the ability to offload specific IT functions to a managed service provider. A Managed Service Provider can play a key role in the success and continuity of your business. Information technology today is crucial and simply ubiquitous. A business could not possibly survive or live up to its greatest potential without some degree of technology; whether it be company smart phones, computers, networks, websites, business specific applications, backups of company data, etc. A managed service provider usually assumes ongoing responsibility for monitoring, managing and upgrading your company’s IT systems on your behalf. This gives businesses peace of mind that the experts are handling the IT part of their business; thus allowing you to put all your energy and efforts into the core business aspect of your company. Not only does this save time, but can also save you money in the long run. There are many vendors and companies providing IT Services, and with the right provider can change your business for the better. There are several IT Services that a small-medium sized business with around 10-50 employees can benefit from in the short run. A few very game changing IT Services that one should consider for their business are as follows:

Microsoft Office 365

Office 365 is a subscription plan that includes access to Office applications plus a wide range of productivity services that are enabled over the internet such as SharePoint, Email, and Skype for Business etc. There are many reasons why a business should use Office 365 as a core IT business service. Security is a huge concern in this day and age, and email is one of the biggest security risks. Office 365 applications are accessed through 128-bit SSL/TSL encryption so that transmission cannot be intercepted. Exchange Online uses Forefront Online protection for Exchange (FOPE) to protect mail from malware and uses anti-spam filtering and antivirus with multiple virus engines. Reliability is another important consideration. Microsoft offers an SLA of 99.9% for scheduled uptime. There are multiple datacenters at work, all over the world, meaning when one goes down, another will take its place. Office 365 is also a very affordable solution and requires very little maintenance as this is done by Microsoft at no additional cost.

Offsite Backup

Every business should understand the importance of backing up their data. Backups are critical for keeping your business up and running when a disaster impedes your day to day business operations or even your business continuity in the long run. Even if you have never had an issue with your data for years, there is always the possibility of something happening to your data. There are many advantages to Offsite backup. The first advantage is the fact that you can access your data from anywhere across the internet. You are not bound by your local network to access backup data. This leads to the next point, where if anything happens to your business, i.e. your site catches fire and you lose all your hardware and internal backups, you still have your offsite backups at a secure remote location. The cost of Offsite backup really depends on how much data you have, a company with 100GB of data to backup will be far cheaper than a business with several terabytes of data.

Private Cloud Hosting

Private cloud is a type of cloud computing that delivers similar advantages to public cloud, including scalability and self-service, but through a proprietary architecture. A private cloud is dedicated to a single organization, thus you are not sharing the same network as other companies and that in itself has advantages; which include better security and privacy. You have much greater control with a private cloud, since the servers are dedicated to a single organization, this allows room to customize and manage a solution that is specific to your requirements. Another great advantage is the ease of converting a physical machine to a virtual machine. There are great disaster recovery options for a server that is virtualized. A huge plus, is the portability of a virtual server. If anything happens to the underlying hardware of a virtual machine, you can simply migrate the server to another server and in most cases it can be done with little service disruption.

Managed IT Services

The most important service that a small-medium sized is of course Managed IT Service. Managed IT Service is exactly what it sounds like, the management of your company’s IT Services. There are many moving parts in your company’s IT environment and if it is not your core business, there is little reason to pull focus off of your core business lines. A better option is having a service provider to manage these services. Most companies try to justify that by managing their own IT, but in most cases it is not cost effective. If your business is large enough to hire internally, there are other aspects that you need to consider. What happens when that person is on vacation or is off sick? Who is verifying and auditing the work and documentation? What happens when your company grows to a large enough size that a single IT employee can handle and not enough to hire a second person? All of these questions and much more should be asked before making a decision on whether to hire internally or outsource. In many of instances when something goes wrong the underlying issue was preventable, whether it was human error or detectable hardware failures that were not being monitored. The lack of expertise, training or monitoring are typically found to be the major sources of downtime. Written by:

Chadd Jones

System Architects Inc.