In a business landscape that’s constantly evolving, it’s more important than ever to manage and protect your data and IT infrastructure effectively and to keep digital lines of communication open to grow your business and uphold your brand reputation.
This isn’t just the reality for one market segment. A small or medium-sized company that runs its own data centre and IT infrastructure struggling to keep up with rapidly changing technology will benefit from a managed hosting provider just as much as a larger scaled operation.
For a reasonable monthly fee, trained experts will build an optimal solution that addresses your concerns (big or small) and meets your business needs. The provider’s knowledge and expertise in cloud-based capabilities will help you grow your business. In fact, by taking the tedious and exhaustive IT chores from your hands, a managed hosting provider frees you to concentrate on other tasks that are most important to your growth and success.
Larger Companies Can Benefit Too
Larger enterprises or organizations with complex needs or even with in-house IT departments realize the benefits that a managed hosting provider offers as well as resource-constrained smaller organizations. Today, some of the most successful IT departments outsource selected services to a provider, and it’s not uncommon under these circumstances to see savings of 20% or even 30%. If the line of business has a project that the IT team either can’t address in time or lack the skills, a managed hosting provider can help and serve as an extension for the IT organization.
By outsourcing, organizations often report their IT staff is happier (offloading the functions they can’t devote time to or often swamped with) and more productive since they can focus more on innovation to support the business or process improvements, instead of spending most of their time reacting to problems.
If you decide you are going to partner with a managed hosting provider, you should first take a close look at your company’s IT strengths and weaknesses. Is your IT staff separated for distinct functions, where not one person has a clear grasp of the overall situation or the expertise to unify different operations into a single technological solution? Then let your managed hosting provider offer the means to create a single, elegant solution while you keep an eye on the bigger picture.
What Should You Look for in a Managed Hosting Provider?
Whether your company is large, medium or small, technologically savvy or trying to keep the lights on, you have a choice of thousands of managed hosting providers and cloud providers. The million-dollar question is, how do you pick the one that is best for you?
As a starting point, determine whether the provider has a strong track record with businesses your size and within your industry or category. Do they know your technology, and can they provide reliable maintenance and proactive security, to thwart the latest malware and other online attacks?
Let potential candidates explain how they will save you the time and money you used to spend managing, diagnosing, or repairing servers, figuring out bugs, and addressing technical issues.
Any downtime for your applications can cost you money and your good reputation with customers. So, the best managed hosting providers will offer around-the-clock monitoring of your network, providing quick support whenever you need it.
Also, take a close look at the candidate’s core competencies. Do the provider’s values align with your critical business needs? Do they have a deep team dedicated and proactive to your needs? Are they a mass market hosting provider or a boutique that can deliver a tailored customer experience? What type of monthly reporting will they offer you to ensure the solution is working in tandem with core business goals/projections? What do their customers say about them?
At Carbon60, we provide complete managed hosting solutions for a wide range of public and private sector organizations with business-critical workloads. Contact Carbon60 today or request a quote, and we can tailor a managed cloud solution to your unique business.