IT services in Auburn

What you need to know about IT services in Auburn

IT services partners can often provide all of the essential services SMBs need at an affordable cost and with much less hassle than having to recruit an in-house IT ops team. Here is a quick guide to what you need to know about IT services in Auburn.

IT services in Auburn work for you and you work for your customers 

This may sound like stating the obvious, but it actually has two significant implications. The first is that working with IT services in Auburn can free up time, energy and budget for you to put towards your core business. The second is that your customers (and law enforcement and regulators) will hold you accountable for anything which happens to any sensitive data. That means it’s on you to supervise your IT support partners appropriately.

Because of this, you’ll want to be clear about whether a potential IT services partner is in Auburn, or at least in the Auburn area, or if they’re just offering services in Auburn but are located elsewhere. Ideally, you want to clarify this at a very early stage as it can have a major impact both on your ability to supervise your IT services partner and on your ability to seek redress through the courts.

You can now lease infrastructure instead of buying it 

Managed hosting makes it possible for SMBs to lease serviced infrastructure. Typically the managed hosting partner will take care of everything up to and including the operating system on the servers. They may even offer to take care of applications, albeit usually as an add-on service. In either case, clients will usually just need to manage anything which is specific to them.

If this sounds a lot like a private cloud then that’s because it can be. In fact these days probably the main use of managed hosting services is as a convenient and cost-effective way to implement a private cloud. This, however, is not a hard-and-fast rule. In fact, probably the second most common use of managed hosting is to keep an old-school data center running until a company can finish their move to the cloud.

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Public clouds are essentially a twist on managed hosting 

The twist is that public clouds are managed hosting in a shared environment. This fact has its advantages and disadvantages. For example, public clouds are hugely flexible in the sense that they can be scaled up and down literally with a few mouse clicks. They are however very inflexible in the sense that your customization options are limited to what your provider supports.

A key point to remember is that public cloud providers only secure their platforms against external threats. It’s up to each customer to ensure that staff logins are used as intended and appropriately protected. This means that even if you only use the public cloud, you may still need additional help from IT services partners such as managed IT security vendors and cloud data backup vendors.

IT services partners might also be able to help you manage your cloud spend. One rather ironic feature of public clouds is that they can either save you a lot of money or cost you a lot of money. It all depends on how you use them.

Part of managing your cloud spend is practicing basic hygiene. In particular, you need to drill it into your staff that they only spin up what they need when they need it and spin it down again as soon as they are finished. You also need to monitor your usage to make sure that this is actually happening in reality. The other part is optimizing your apps so that they take maximum advantage of everything the cloud can do and hence work at their highest level of efficiency.

Managed IT services vendors can take care of regular maintenance 

Everybody must know the feeling of being far too busy with “proper work” to clean up behind themselves with the result that anything “non-urgent” just keeps piling up until it suddenly becomes very urgent indeed. Managed IT services vendors square this circle by taking care of regular maintenance tasks so you can focus on taking care of your proper business.

IT support vendors are there when you need an extra pair of hands 

IT support vendors provide short-term help for specific needs. In the old days that largely meant break/fix work. That’s still a part of their role, but these days, they’re usually more focused on project work. That change probably reflects the fact that the managed IT services sector makes sure that systems get the care and maintenance they need so they are less likely to have failures.

If you’d like to speak to a reputable and experienced IT services provider in Auburn, please click here now to contact Salient IT.