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What you need to know about IT services in Woodland
The move from data centers to the cloud hasn’t eliminated the need for IT services. Quite the opposite, if anything it’s created more of demand for them as the SMB sector flourishes. In fact, the IT services sector is now so huge that navigating it can be a bit of a challenge. With that in mind, here is a quick guide to what you need to know about IT services in Woodland.
If you’re working purely in the public cloud
In principle, the public cloud can be an all-in-one solution for SMBs, eliminating the need for them to spend any money on managing their own infrastructure. In practice, however, it can still be an extremely good idea for SMBs to employ their own IT services partners to assist with security-related issues.
The key point to note is that public cloud providers only secure their platform against external threats and data leakage between users. It’s down to each client (or “tenant”) to ensure that their staff members use the public cloud appropriately and that staff accounts are protected from being compromised.<
Achieving this requires a combination of robust policies and processes together with effective enforcement, including consistent monitoring. Managed IT services partners can take care of the monitoring for you, saving you the need to hire an internal IT team.
It’s also worth noting that it can be extremely risky to rely solely on the automated backups performed by many public cloud platforms. While these are convenient, they’re also a classic example of putting all your eggs in one basket. In fact, you could make a strong case for arguing that if you have your only backup in the same location as your production data you don’t actually have a backup at all.
In principle, you can backup your data yourself to a physical device, but in practice that would arguably rather defeat the purpose of being in the cloud in the first place. It can make a whole lot more sense to back up to another cloud (public or private) and a cloud data backup vendor would be able to help.
If you’re working in a private cloud
If you want or need your own private cloud, then often the most straightforward and cost-effective way to make that happen is to use managed hosting for the core set-up and managed IT services for any regular care-and-maintenance tasks over and above the ones which are provided as part of your core service.
The standard approach to managed hosting is that the managed hosting vendor leases infrastructure for a client’s sole use and takes care of everything up to and usually including the operating system on the servers. These days, there are even managed hosting vendors who will also take care of applications. This is still generally seen as an extra service at an added cost, but it can be a convenient option. You can then top this up with managed IT services as required.
If you’re going down the managed hosting route, then your additional needs are likely to relate to protecting your data. Unlike with the public cloud, however, you’re going to need to secure your platform against external threats as well as abuse of staff accesses (even accidentally). Remember that what you’re really worried about is the security of your data and that will almost certainly be outside the scope of your managed hosting agreement.
As before, however, you can use managed IT services to bridge the gap. In particular, you’re likely to benefit from managed IT security and cloud data backup services. For the sake of completeness, as before, you could backup your data to a physical device, but again, this arguably rather defeats the object of working in the cloud. You could use a secondary private cloud for backups or you could backup to a public cloud (or both). Either way, a cloud data backup vendor would be able to help.
If you’re still running a data center
Managed hosting plus managed IT services can also be used to run a traditional data center cost-effectively (or at least as cost-effectively as a data center can be).
IT support vendors provide short-term help for specific issues
Regardless of what kind of system you are running, IT support vendors can provide short-term help for specific issues. In the old days, this basically translated to break/fix work in data centers (and with endpoints). IT support vendors do still undertake break/fix work, but these days there is much more emphasis on project work.
If you’d like to speak to a reputable and experienced IT services provider in Woodland, please click here now to contact Salient IT.
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