Do you need hosted services? Answer these questions about your Calgary organization:
- Are you planning to offer your employees permanent remote work?
- Does your organization have seasonal fluctuations or expect rapid growth to occur?
- Are you eager to manage your IT budget more effectively with cost-effective solutions?
- Do you have aging IT infrastructure that would be costly to replace?
Hosted services are the cure for what ails your IT infrastructure – like an aspirin for your headache. Hosted services provide:
- Customized, budget-sensitive solutions for your IT support needs
- Reduced operating costs for your business
- Peace of mind with the knowledge that your data is secure
What Is a Cloud Hosting Service?
In the simplest terms, hosted services are services that you access via the internet. With hosted services, instead of having everything required to operate your business stored on onsite servers, you simply pay for the space you need on secure, locally hosted servers. This frees your organization from having to make capital investments in infrastructure or from absorbing the cost of maintaining that infrastructure.
There are multiple components to hosted services, but they all fit under the umbrellas of:
- Software as a Service (SaaS)
- Hardware as a Service (HaaS)
- Platform as a Service (PaaS)
The combination of these elements provides comprehensive security, capacity, scalability, and access to state-of-the-art equipment. It helps keep your business operational in the most cost-effective and customized manner possible.
How Do Cloud Hosting Services Work?
A cloud hosting service works by making your business operations accessible from anywhere. Instead of storing all of your applications and data on a single server, your operations are hosted on a series of physical and virtual cloud servers that allow increased flexibility. Features of cloud hosting include:
- Nearly instant scalability to accommodate rapid growth or reduced need for space
- Cost-effective resource management, since you only pay for the space you need
- Support for multiple types of database configurations, including SQL and NoSQL
- 24/7 secure monitoring for increased uptime and access
IT hosted services offer businesses a secure infrastructure for all their business needs.
Data, content, and services are hosted and stored via the cloud on The ITeam’s secure servers, linking businesses to their critical data without the dangers of on-premises storage and management.
Managed hosting offers continuous and uninterrupted access for the end-user, optimizing content delivery eliminates downtime.
What Is the Difference Between Cloud Services and Hosted Services?
It can be really confusing trying to decipher the difference between cloud services and hosted services, because the two are quite similar. Both cloud and hosted services are services in which your data is stored off-premises. Both are accessed by logging on through the internet. However, cloud services are resources that achieve cost-effectiveness by pooling resources among several clients. Hosted services replace the physical servers that are typically found inside a business and provide the maintenance, storage, and security for those private servers.
Hosted Services vs. Managed Services
Similar to comparing cloud hosting and hosted services, it’s easy to confuse hosted services and managed services. Hosted services are any of the services that are not physically located at your facility. Managed services are hosted services with additional support, monitoring, and security that are provided by a team of experts partnering with you to help you achieve your goals by aligning your IT strategy with your business strategy.
Benefits of Hosted Services
An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
Hosted services enhance your organization’s ability to maintain business continuity and serve your customers. You may benefit from the following:
Enhanced security – Hosted services provide updates to your operating systems, filter spam, eliminate viruses, and prevent hackers from accessing your sensitive data. One of the most crucial roles of cloud servucesis to enhance security, increase uptime, and allow business leaders to focus on their clients, not on their IT.
24/7 monitoring – Expert-level monitoring of equipment, software, applications, and servers to ensure that anything that might go wrong is stopped in its tracks.
Offsite backup and recovery – In this age of data breaches, nothing is more crucial than a secure network. Offsite backups are a must for every business, protecting organizations from the loss of data that occurs as a result of onsite server failures, cyber-attacks, or physical catastrophes such as fire, flood, theft, or vandalism.
Managed email – One of the easiest ways to prevent security issues is to filter them out before they ever reach your business. Using a hosted email service provides an additional layer of security to every aspect of your operation.
Which Service Is Right for your Business?
What makes cloud hosting the future of IT support in Calgary are the limitless customization options available to make these suit your business needs and budget.
Hosted services are provided in a highly customized manner that may be different for every client.
- A client in the healthcare industry may be singularly focused on backup and recovery as a means of protecting patient data.
- An oil and gas industry client may need state-of-the-art hardware that they don’t have to think about or maintain but can still count on uptime.
- An SME may need a combination of services that provides maximum value for the investment.
- A construction industry client may need secure communications from multiple locations.
- A legal firm might need to have secure backups of all of their pertinent files to minimize risk during active casework.
The ITeam provides hosting services and customized IT support to Calgary and Alberta businesses, with secure storage and 24/7 monitoring in a Calgary-based secure facility.
These services are not a one-size-fits-all solution.
The ITeam will work with your business to customize a cost-effective solution and help you develop a comprehensive plan that will ensure the peace of mind you need to focus on your business.