IT services in Roseville

What you need to know about IT services in Roseville

The IT services industry enables businesses, especially SMBs, to manage their IT infrastructure in a straightforward, flexible and cost-effective manner. This then makes it possible for them to spend more time on their core business. As with most purchasing decisions, the key to getting the most out of IT services is to understand your needs and wants and to choose the IT services which meet them best. With that in mind, here is a quick guide to the main IT services in Roseville.

Getting started

In the old days, setting up a corporate network meant spending a chunk of money upfront to buy infrastructure to cover your peak periods (even though, literally, by definition, these would only be a small part of your overall usage). It also meant recruiting, retaining and managing an in-house IT operations team to keep everything working. This was a significant barrier to the adoption of technology in the SMB sector, but thankfully that barrier is now gone.

Managed hosting vendors let you lease serviced infrastructure for your own use

Now, if you want to set up a private corporate network, you can just lease everything you need from a managed hosting partner and they will take care of it for you. This eliminated the need for capital expenditure and allows for more flexibility as well as smoother cash-flows. It also eliminates the need to hire an in-house IT ops team to maintain your basic infrastructure.

Typically, the managed hosting vendor will take care of everything up to and including the operating system on the servers. This means that the client just needs to arrange for the management of their own applications and data. These days, however, some managed hosting vendors are taking their cue from the public cloud and offering to manage applications. This is still largely seen as an extra service at additional cost but can be very convenient.

For the sake of clarity, managed hosting is not a private cloud, although it is often used to create them. It is infrastructure to use as you see fit. In other words, it can also be used to run data centers even if only until cloud migrations have been completed.

The public cloud is basically managed hosting in a shared environment

Public clouds are massively flexible and cost-effective, which is exactly why so many SMBs are using them as their first choice for all their IT needs. There are, however, some caveats to them.

First of all, the fact that they are shared environments means that clients (or “tenants”) are completely dependent upon their cloud provider for anything to do with external security. In most cases, however, this is a non-issue, at least if you use a mainstream provider, as they are very thorough about this.

Secondly, your customization options will be limited to what your provider can support. Again, in most cases, this will be a non-issue. The major public cloud platforms typically have more than enough customization options for the average SMB.

Request IT Services

Thirdly, you can find it challenging to be able to demonstrate compliance with necessary data-protection laws and regulations. The issue is not so much that the shared nature of public-cloud platforms makes them inherently insecure. It’s the fact that, these days, laws and compliance programs increasingly demand, not just that you do the right thing, but that you provide proof that you have done the right thing. This can be very difficult when you only have partial control over your environment.

Public-cloud platforms are working on this and it is often possible to use them even for sensitive data. If not, then private clouds can often be implemented very affordably, thanks to managed hosting.

Managed IT services and IT support can keep you running smoothly

Although managed IT services and managed IT hosting have similar names, they are actually very different concepts. Managed IT services vendors are basically the people who take care of the regular, predictable care-and-maintenance tasks, which make sure that everything stays running, at least most of the time. IT support vendors are the people who step in when it doesn’t (and who also help with implementing projects).

In other words, managed IT services and IT support are what you might think of as “twin” IT services and many companies provide both. The key point to note, however, is that the services will be treated, and billed, separately. Managed IT services will usually be billed according to a fixed, monthly tariff, whereas IT support services will be billed on an hourly basis and in arrears.

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