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What you need to know about the main IT services in Placerville
The IT services industry saves SMBs time, money and hassle. It’s therefore hardly a surprise that it has grown absolutely huge and become organized into niches, subniches and even subsubniches. Here is a quick guide to the main IT services in Placerville.
Managed hosting and the public cloud
In the old days, SMBs had to work out what infrastructure they needed before they needed it, buy enough of it to cope with peak demand (even if that was one hour of one day each year) and manage it entirely themselves, including making changes to it as their business needs changed. For many, this was just a headache they didn’t need, hence the enthusiastic adoption of managed hosting services and the public cloud, which is basically a specific implementation of managed hosting.
With managed hosting services, the client leases infrastructure for their own private use and the managed hosting vendor takes care of everything up to and including the operating system on the servers. All the client then had to do was take care of their own applications and data and now there are managed hosting vendors who can also take care of applications, albeit usually as an add-on service.
If this sounds like a private cloud, then the answer is that managed hosting often is used to create private clouds, but it can also be used to keep a data center running until a cloud migration is complete. In fact, it can be used for both purposes at the same time and combined with the public cloud as well, although this is probably a bit too complicated (and unnecessary) for most SMBs.
The public cloud is basically managed hosting but in a communal environment. This means that the client (or “tenants”) cannot exercise control over the platform in the same way as they could if they were working in a private cloud, but it also means that clients can spin resources up and down literally with a few mouse-clicks thus literally only paying for what they use.
Many SMBs are therefore choosing to use the public cloud whenever they can but also using a private cloud when they need extra security for their most sensitive data. This is a very sensible approach, which managed hosting can make a whole lot easier (and more affordable).
Managed IT services vendors take care of regular tasks
Managed IT services vendors used to be the people who took care of standard care-and-maintenance in data centers. They still can be, but it’s far more likely that they’ll be undertaking regular care-and-maintenance of private clouds or helping SMBs to manage their use of public clouds.
One of the key points to understand about public clouds is that security is a shared responsibility. The platform vendor takes care of securing their platform against external threats and insulating users from each other. Each client then has to take responsibility for protecting themselves against internal threats and also from external threats caused (or at least facilitated) by poor internal security (such as users sharing login details).
There are various aspects to ensuring robust security in public clouds, but one of them is monitoring staff usage and another is monitoring systems for any signs that they have been compromised. These are both areas in which managed IT services vendors (specifically managed IT security services vendors) can help.
It’s also worth noting that monitoring staff usage of the cloud can also help with cloud cost-optimization. Managing the way people use cloud resources (in particular making sure use does reflect need, rather than lack of organization) is essential to ensuring that public clouds are cost-effective.
Cloud data backup vendors protect data in the public cloud
This may seem a surprising IT service to mention, especially given that so many public cloud vendors automatically back-up data held on their platform. It is, however, a very important one. Public cloud vendors completely delete data the moment they are told to and if it turns out that this data was deleted in error (or malice), then that is the client’s problem, not theirs. It is therefore strongly recommended to take an additional backup of any data held in the cloud.
IT support vendors provide short-term support for specific issues
Thanks to managed IT services, IT support teams these days tend to be less involved with break/fix work and more involved with project work. They are also more likely to be working in a cloud than in a traditional data center, but they are still the people you call on when you need something done and/or something fixed.
If you’d like to speak to a reputable and experienced IT services partner in Placerville, please click here now to contact Salient IT.
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