Managing your information infrastructure can be a time consuming activity. We know, we look after it for a number of our customers. In best serving these customers, we are always on the lookout for strategies we can employ to reduce these business costs. Some of the technologies available to reduce your business costs include:
Infrastructure as a Service
Flexible enterprise systems at a fraction of the cost.
IaaS or Private Cloud is a fully managed, scalable, enterprise-class platform available on demand – pay for only what you use and remove the hassles of provisioning and maintaining complex IT systems. Essentially you rent server and storage space in the cloud; as your needs change you can quickly increase or decrease your usage – the most cost effective way to operate your IT systems.
Why IaaS?
- No upfront hardware costs
- No maintenance issues
- Access to the latest technologies
- Flexible and scalable
- Reduced IT staff expenditure
Desktop as a Service
Desktop as a Service (DaaS) provides you with virtual desktops which are hosted on a Cloud server. You can access your desktops, data and applications from almost any device wherever you like, simplifying operations, improving security and reducing costs.
Imagine having to update a critical application over 30 computers – your IT team would have to work overnight or all weekend ensuring every machine is updated correctly. With DaaS, the change is made in one central place and automatically reflected across all machines – less risk, less downtime, less cost.
DaaS solution benefits:
- DaaS reduces onsite IT support requirements, ongoing maintenance and the hassle of upgrading operating systems and applications.
- Ensure data loss is a thing of the past as everything is stored in the Cloud.
- Disaster recovery is easy – in the event of a natural disaster at your customer’s site, the staff can simply relocate and continue working from any other device.
- New desktops can be provisioned in minutes rather than hours.
- Enhanced security – virus and malware attacks are far easier to manage; if something is compromised a fresh new instance of the desktop can be deployed in minutes.
Cloud Managed Firewall
In a car, the firewall prevents (or slows) an engine fire from entering the passenger area of the car.
In a computer network, a firewall prevents (or limits) communication from outside of your organisation into your organisation's computers. In very limited circumstances, there may be a reason to allow an outside computer to access your internal computers.
To maintain security, rules should be updated as new issues arise. Sometimes the software on a firewall can have errors which allow malicious users to bypass its security, so it's important to ensure that the software on the firewall is always up to date.
A cloud managed firewall solves these problems. Our technicians maintain the rules and ensure that the firewall software is always up to date.
Colocation, Hosting and Virtual Private Servers
You have a website, right? If you're using WordPress, Squarespace or any of a number of similar services, your website will be hosted. This means that it runs on a single computer shared with a number of other organisations' websites. This is good (and cheap), unless one of the websites which you share starts getting a lot of traffic. In this case, your website performance could be badly affected. Hopefully, the hosting provider will notice this and migrate the high-traffic website to another dedicated server (costing more money).
If you're concerned about privacy, for example because you are running an e-commerce website, you may want the additional security of running your website on a single server. This can be done as a virtual private server where your website is still sharing a single computer with other websites, but it appears to your website that it is on a dedicated server.
Finally, if you are running a more sophisticated website, you may want the guarantee that your website is running on your own entirely dedicated computer. This option is colocation, your computer is located on a high bandwidth connection to the Internet which guarantees redundant Internet connections and redundant power supplies. For some of our clients, this is the necessary solution.
Talk to us about your needs and we can help you choose the right option for your circumstances.