Monthly Archives: June 2016

Achieving Network Peace of Mind

Network Peace of MindBy proactively monitoring and managing your Network infrastructure, you can avoid the hassles of downtime due to bottlenecks, security intrusions and more. By having the latest data at your fingertips, you can make the best decisions based on the current status of all the devices connected to your network. Proactively managed devices including desktops, laptops, smartphones, tablets, routers, switches and firewalls all contribute to the overall health of your network. By monitoring your network for performance and auditing your devices for compliance, you can keep things running smoothly.

Moving to Managed Services

Managed services offers a fixed-price model to manage your network and IT infrastructure. A managed service provider will proactively audit the assets on your network, monitor performance, and remediate or escalate issues as part of a fixed-price service agreement.  Because the cost of service delivery is fixed versus billable hours, the managed service provider has incentives to keep things running with minimal interruption. A managed service agreement often includes onsite and remote support options in addition to remote monitoring and management. As a result, you have a trusted source to call when problems arise.

Is Your Network Worry Free?

By having a consolidated asset inventory of your entire network, your managed service provider can isolate issues that cause your network performance to degrade. This helps avoid jitter, packet loss, and data delay for networking infrastructure. Desktops, laptops, smartphones and tablets can be checked to ensure they are in compliance and free of malware, viruses and other sources of network intrusion.

 

Benefits of Managed Services

 

The managed service model provides a predictable cost to the business owner for service delivery. Surprises from hourly overruns and network downtime are avoided, because your infrastructure is proactively monitored and managed. With less downtime interruption and improved network performance, your employees are more productive. What’s more, productive employees feel better about coming to work each day.

If you want to take the worry out of your network performance contact your service provider to find out how you can achieve network peace of mind.

Are Public Cloud Services Right for Your Business?

Public Cloud

Every day more companies realize the cloud offers them brand new ways to solve their business problems. Public Cloud services are available for a wide range of solutions, including Communications and Collaboration, CRM, Contact Center, Email, File Sharing, Network Management, Cloud Storage, and more.

What to Expect from Public Cloud Services

According to a 2015 Whitepaper on Cloud Definitions by IDC, “Public Cloud services are shared among unrelated enterprises and consumers; open to a largely unrestricted universe of potential users; and designed for a market, not a single enterprise.” Public Cloud Services offer an affordable alternative to Private Cloud Services dedicated to a single company or extended enterprise. According to the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology, Cloud Services include the following characteristics:

 

  • Shared, Standard Services – Build for Multitenancy, among or within the enterprise

  • Solutions Packaged – A “turnkey” offering, pre-integrates required resources

  • Self-service – Provisioning and management typically via a Web portal

  • Elastic, Resource Scaling – Dynamic, rapid and fine-grained

  • Ubiquitous (authorized) Network Access – Typically accessible via the Internet

  • Standard UI Technologies – Browser, RIA clients, underlying technologies

  • Published Service Interface/API – Web services other common internet APIs

Considerations for Public vs. Private Cloud

Private Cloud Solutions provide a company dedicated resources and additional access to the Cloud Infrastructure. This capability could be important for regulatory compliance or high availability solutions. Private Cloud tradeoff includes Cost versus Control over Public Cloud Services. Data residency may also be a factor in your decision for Public Cloud Services versus Private Cloud Services.

With all these variables that will likely change over time, it is important to reach out to a consultant with Cloud subject matter expertise to determine if a Public Cloud Service is right for your business. Reach out to your Cloud Service expert for a Cloud Readiness Assessment to get the most from your investment in Cloud Services.