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Mar 26
2010
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Is your company able to make the necessary investments in infrastructure and updated technology to improve your online performance? Does your IT staff have the expertise to manage the processes, platforms, software, and reporting tools to meet today’s requirements for infrastructure security and reliability? Making decisions around managed Hosting does not have to be a laborious exercise.
A number of reasons stand out for examination:
1. Stability. Because most managed hosting providers lease network bandwidth from one or more carriers, a service provider which owns and runs its own network offers a distinct advantage over one that leases bandwidth. Apart from stability and control over assets ownership reflects significant investment in fiber, peering relationships with multiple ISPs around the globe. These relationships mean a service provider that has built this resource can easily withstand a failure in one or more parts of its network without customers missing a beat.
2. Service capability. In house IT – or rather the lack of it – are a fundamental driver to outsourced solutions. It is therefore essential that a provider offers immediate support from an administrator-level technician. In other words someone who can solve your problem. A service provider should be able to demonstrate support team consisting of personnel with years of experience in a range of technologies in managed hosting.
3. Security checks. Guarantee of 100% uptime is a given as far as service provider offering. In other words this should be an essential part of a service level agreement. In today’s security conscious world business decision makers want their service providers to conduct vulnerability scan on all servers, to ensure no configuration changes or malware has opened the door to a security threat.
4. Hardware Replacement. The fear of any data center manager is the early Sunday morning call about a broken server component. A service provider needs to demonstrate a capacity to replace hardware on a same day basis –preferably within an hour. This would require a stock of spare parts for all servers.
5. Scalability. Finally, one of the more challenging aspects of running a data center is consistently meeting the demand for computing power in a dynamic business environment. Organic business growth is seldom linear hence there is a need to have a service provider offer a capacity to quickly scale your server environment.