Category Archives: Cloud Computing

The Ten Main Criteria When Choosing a Managed Services Provider

The IT function continues to question how to manage more demand for services among the increasing complexity, with limited resources and experience. The pressure on the IT continues while companies are faced with fixed budgets or increasing reduced and increase expectations of IT to create value and business innovation.

For this reason, organizations IT cannot do it alone. They are seeking trusted IT services to help them reduce the cost, manage complexity, ensure desired levels of availability, maintain frontline techniques and incorporate technological innovation.

The potential benefits of managed services are achieved only if a suitable supplier is chosen, who you can demonstrate the ability to provide knowledge, processes, and resources to overcome their internal capabilities. When evaluating providers of managed services, you can consider the following 10 criteria to make an informed decision.

Knowledge and Expertise

Any managed service provider should, at least, have the knowledge that goes beyond conventional management and operating system availability and maintenance. Check the level of knowledge related to management changes, virtualization, high availability, middleware and databases data, multiple network technologies, integration platform, mobility, security and, of course, cloud technologies.

Ask about scalability and availability of staff to establish specialized techniques, how to organize and share information with the best-approved practices. Similarly, a managed service provider should have extensive experience in all delivery models, including not only managed services and cloud but also conventional and IT strategic outsourcing. Thus, the provider can help customers achieve a structured multi-strategy (internal, managed services, outsourcing, and cloud) to meet the individual needs of the company.

Technology-based Approach

Find out if the service provider has a precautionary approach to the problem and the improvement plan. Look for a provider that goes beyond the little monitoring and management of the device. For example, the provider can use sophisticated technologies such as advanced analysis to boost the prevention of incidents through patterns analysis of failure on all platforms and processes, providing visibility within the areas for the client and improvement of the service provider.

The provider should employ the sophisticated technology of secondary system in all managed services offered. It can provide capabilities such as the complex mechanisms of alert, classification and prioritization of tasks, and scaling and repair incidents. Find out how much the service provider uses automation to reduce human intervention and improve quality and productivity.

Conform to Industry Best Practices

The key to a reliable IT infrastructure and high availability is to optimize IT management. A vendor service should employ industry best practices to manage their IT resources to adapt the management of IT services. They include problem management, incident cases, change, configuration, inventory, capacity and performance and creating reports. They are also critical areas to investigate best practices make the transition from an internal management system to the provider.

Consolidated Service Visibility

Your provider services must be willing to share examples of policies and process documentation and explain how it played through multiple delivery centers. A service provider should have a knowledge management system that allows the personal access to historical information problems and solutions from anywhere.

It is also important, the means by which the service provider provides visibility into the strength of its infrastructure and the operation of its managed services. Look for a secure web-based portal that consolidates related services within a single panel with real-time service visibility and online tools to manage services.

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Support Multi-environments

Current infrastructures are traditionally heterogeneous environments comprising products network, hardware, and software provided by a variety of distributors. A service provider should have a minimum proven experience in multi-environments and especially collaborate with distributors leaders to ensure availability and updated visibility into product development routes and new technologies. A right service provider should play a professional trusted advisor role, helping you choose technologies that would best suit your business.

Providing Consistent Services

Choose a managed services provider with a worldwide capacity that can help to position companies of all sizes to grow and expand in today’s global economy. Global delivery capabilities offer many advantages, including a rapid deployment in new locations, the ability to effectively manage client projects covering operations in many countries, local language support to subsidiaries or branches, and location of resources and data within the country to address legal requirements and regulatory requirements. Check if the service provider has standard delivery processes in all places and how they organize and communicate teams among them.

Performance Based Service Level Agreements

A significant advantage of the managed services is that the responsibility lies with the supplier performance services. Your priority should be on what the service provider provides more than how the service is provided, which allows the supplier to innovate, improve service delivery and reduce costs.

In turn, the service provider should be willing to commit contractually to meet their needs regarding service and support these commitments to economic sanctions or other compensation if these service level agreements are not maintained.

Comprehensive Portfolio of Managed Services

Since the needs of your business and IT are in continuous change, you need the flexibility to add managed services without unnecessarily increasing costs and complexity. Many organizations have realized that fragmentation services, using numerous managed services can be quite complicated and expensive.

To ensure flexibility in the future, make sure any potential supplier offers a complete managed solution services, from infrastructure management to the managed security, resilience, mobility and other IT services for managed hosting and cloud. Moreover, look for a provider that offers you flexibility such as to enable it to retain its current equipment and even their current processes.

Technology Foresight

With the increasingly frequent strategic partnerships, is essential to consider the impact that relations procurement can have, not only in the business results but also in the primary business model and corporate culture of the company. If innovation and transformation are essential elements in its strategy of activities, what can make a Managed Services supplier?

Do they have the knowledge or exclusive experiences that bring clarity to the future technological or market changes? What competitive advantages could the provider bring? How it can help the experience, assets and coverage provider and network of partners to develop new business models or grow into new markets?

Reputation and Financial Stability

Whether you are thinking short term as first steps into managed services or if you are looking long-term strategic relationship, prospecting of financial stability is with the provider is critical. It is worth to consider the experience; services offered, and opinions provided by analysts and specialized in IT and business press.

DedicatedSolutions goals are clearly defined as per the above top ten criteria. We want to deliver the best service to our customers while keeping the costs for our clients as little as possible. Through the combination of Tier III & Tier IV data center facilities, the ability to offer our customers multiple 10 Gig pipes at each location and only providing the best hardware possible, we can truly offer a 99.9% uptime – guaranteed.

Our staff continually strives to serve you with the best possible support. All our facilities have 24×7 staffing – whether it be network technicians, system administrators or support members. Besides the uptime, we also guarantee and warrant you that you will have unlimited bandwidth with our unlimited solutions.

Five Top Trends That Will Define IT Landscape in 2016

Of all the important issues that keep executives awake, probably none is more important than to think “Are we keeping up to the date?”. The rapid pace of change in IT and business, in general, means that CIOs and other senior technologists cannot afford to be decentralized.

Where should you focus your energies as you build your to-do list for 2016? Forecast 2016 Computerworld survey of IT professional outlines five key areas – cloud computing, security, Internet of things, analysis, and the development of IT as a change-agent that promise to define the IT landscape in 2016.

IT As An Agent of Change

Finally, IT can move fully towards the center of the company in 2016 as the digital processing becomes an important strategic priority. Thanks to the economic growth, CIOs, and their IT organizations are well positioned to drive this change, increases in staff and a pronounced trend toward strategic spending.

Almost half (46%) of the 182 survey respondents said they are preparing for increased spending on technology, with anticipated budget increases averaging 14.7%. (Those numbers are higher than last year when 43% of respondents said they expected to increase spending, and the expected average was 13.1%.)

At the same time, 37% of respondents this year said they are planning to increase IT staff, compared with 24% last year. In addition, 42% of those hiring plans are looking for people with expertise in technology and business, that will articulate the value of IT in meeting business objectives.

This mixed knowledge will be essential for IT to achieve its primary goals in 2016 – 19% of the respondents said their mission is to generate new revenue or increase the existing ones in the next 12 months. Also, on the list is the acceleration of business processes and agility (cited by 40% of respondents) and improved collaboration with business units (35%).

While IT has made great progress in moving towards the strategic center of the company, there is more work to be done – mostly focuses on building relationships with business stakeholders.

Cloud Computing

As organizations are building an IT infrastructure for the future, there is no doubt that the cloud will play a key role. The real test is to figure out which model of cloud computing is the best choice for a particular company.

Almost half (48%) of the Forecast 2016 survey respondents said that cloud computing is an area for increased spending in their organizations, and 14% cited cloud initiatives as the draft most important technology for the coming year. Some 29% confirmed that they had already moved some business applications to the cloud with more plans; while 7% said they are in the process of migrating mission critical systems in a cloud environment.

On the other hand, 22% of respondents said their organizations are conducting beta testing or pilot programs covering the complete list of cloud delivery methods including private, public and hybrid options.

Now that the cloud is a standard element of IT architectures, the question facing CIOs is whether to use cloud-based systems and which deployment model is best for their organizations. Some things will be given a private cloud model while others take advantage of external cloud services or new types of delivery models.

Security

Data breaches made high profile last year (2015), with attention grabbing headlines. Maintaining the security is again at the top of IT budgets for the third year.

Exactly half of respondents this year (versus 46% last year) said security spending will increase in 2016; making safety the first choice among technology initiatives related to higher spending. When they were asked to identify the most important project of technology currently underway in their organizations, security came in second place (chosen by 12% of respondents), behind cloud computing by only two percentile points. And 16% of these identified security as their biggest challenge regarding leadership for the coming year; surpassed only by budget and economic pressures.

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The Internet of Things

The so-called Internet of Things (IoT) is no longer the stuff of science fiction, but a reality shortly for IT organizations across many industries. IoT technologies can be implemented in all kinds of practical uses, such as optimizing the supply chain through RFID, and performance monitoring focused on energy saving system.

Forecast 2016 Computerworld survey states 29% of respondents identified initiatives and IoT projects such as machine-to-machine and telematics as new areas of spending for this year. By comparison, last year, only 12% of respondents said that the work of IoT would be a new IT spending in 2015. Similarly, the percentage of the respondent said they planned to launch IoT projects in the next 12 months, which is 15% higher as compared to last year.

Analysis

As businesses pivot towards the digital market, the significant expenditure in the analysis of data will continue. The business analysis was No. 5 on the list of major projects for IT respondents and No. 3 in the technologies that they will get an increase in expenses over the next 12 months.

Having organized all your data, companies are now finding out how to use them effectively. At the same time, the analytical capabilities are being integrated into more and more applications and workflows for daily use, rather than being only available in separate tools.

The analysis also is infiltrating rapidly throughout the area of ​​machine learning, artificial intelligence and pattern recognition. This analysis can help discern patterns that are not apparent to humans.

The Wearables

While products like Google Glass and Apple Watch were announced with great fanfare, the reality is that companies are not willing to make practical use of the wearable systems, at least in the future foreseeable.

The wearable technology was last in the list of Forecast 2016 Computerworld survey, currently being evaluated in beta and pilot projects, with only 4% of respondents saying they had projects involving current wearables.

Moreover, 78% said they might work on wearable applications or anticipating the need to support wearables in the near future. And only 8% of these people said that the wearables would play a role in their commercial and technological operations while only 12% said they were adjusting their management strategies to include wearables mobile devices.