Category Archives: Managed Services

What Belongs To The CIOs Agenda in 2016: Prioritize IT Investments

The ever-increasing expectations of customers and the ever shorter innovation cycles have a fundamental reorientation of the IT landscape and the underlying unavoidable control mechanisms. The biggest mover among the technology trends in 2016 compared to previous years is the Design Thinking.

More and more companies use design thinking to target better their products and services to customers. IT budgets are an absolute top priority of CIOs. In 2016, however, the design thinking form the basis of many transformation projects that need to be orchestrated by CIOs.

Business Intelligence and analytics have long been one of the CIOs top priorities, and although new investments press on, it will also in 2016 be number one on the list. In Gartner survey of 2,944 CIOs from 84 different countries, CIOs responded that BI/analytics will be the first place for investment with 50 percent of CIOs had this area in the top three of their investment priorities.

Here are CIOs priorities for investment in 2016, according to Gartner:

  1. BI/analytics (39 percent)
  2. Infrastructure and data center (27 percent)
  3. Cloud (25 percent)
  4. ERP (21 percent)
  5. Digitization and digital marketing (21 percent)
  6. Mobile solutions (20 percent)
  7. Security (15 percent)
  8. Network, voice and data communications (10 percent)
  9. Legacy modernization (10 percent)
  10. Industry-specific applications (9 percent)
  11. CRM (9 percent)

While the mobile solutions and CRM are a lower priority of CIOs in 2016 than in previous years, there are also areas that they now prioritize higher than in the past.

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Biggest Challenges

When CIOs asked what their biggest challenges at the moment, the answer is that the lack of the right people and squeezed budgets. Nearly 59 percent of CIOs think we have a decided talent crisis, however, only 17 percent of respondents who actually believes that the lack of the right skills prevents them from reaching their goals.

The survey also shows that more and more CIOs are beginning to work with so-called bimodal IT where one splitter IT organization into two departments. It is done to be better able to work at different speeds and cope with both the traditional operation and the more agile and innovative IT projects.

Cloud Instead of Outsourcing

Traditional outsourcing contracts that promise guaranteed cost savings of 10 to 15 percent per year over a period of 5 to 10 years have become the significant exception. The demand for flexible cloud solutions, which are now also increasingly provided locally and which make it possible to respond to short-term changes in demand through appropriate consumption adjustment.

In the medium term, all new IT initiatives on new technologies such as cloud services, big data and analytics, mobile computing and social media will take priority. In the long term, budgets are increasingly spent on new things that were not feasible on the ancient architectures and technologies. New digital products and services will be in focus. A new information framework will be required to support the product development, delivery, quality, and growth.

By 2018, at least, half of IT spending will be channeled into cloud-based solutions. Without cloud services nothing will go in the future, because cloud forms both the basis for new digital products and services. To meet these challenges, CIOs should rethink their management model. In reality, hybrid cloud landscapes will be implemented that can be used to integrate and management for IT organizations.

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.

The Four Steps to Succeed in Your IT Systems Management

Organizations that are large or small, public or private, local or international, facing unprecedented challenges to support critical business initiatives in the dynamic business environment. Users are now scattered in many places; they bring their own mobile devices to work and expect IT to deliver fast and efficient services as well as support for those systems.

It is now possible that organizations achieve IT effectiveness without cutting the service levels by the adoption of a System Management strategy. DedicatedSolutions provides you with the best-dedicated server hardware in our multiple data centers across the globe.

If you have not decided yet how to build your Infrastructure, the below four steps can help companies improve the efficiency of the different processes of production, sales and administration; reduce costs and increase their competitiveness through the use of our managed services, information and communication technologies.

Know Your Infrastructure

See your network from a whole new perspective of the strategy of IT systems management of an organization depends on the discovery process. Managers must know what components are on the network, how assets are performing, who is not in compliance with IT policies and what to do to comply again. Unfortunately, the inventory lists do not always agree with reality and systems often fall into oblivion.

DedicatedSolutions provides visibility to all IT environment assets to collect and update management data automatically in real time. Although new assets enter the environment through acquisitions, lifecycles of IT, mobile workers or policies and other can be managed by our custom solutions.

On the other hand, whether you remain connected or not, DedicatedSolutions predefined applied policies on the new system stores the information in a central repository that can be used to provide proactive maintenance, providing solution and produce reports and alerts on any changes for administrators.

Manage Your IT Environment More Efficiently

Today, most organizations require operations around the clock, seven days a week, but traditionally, the management of IT systems has become a decentralized manner with product manuals in multiple processor points that are far from providing general availability. Administrators can perform maintenance and typically keep the systems in operation, but the work is hardly consistent between systems and usually is not documented and is performed manually.

DedicatedSolutions provides a unique framework where you can perform administration tasks remotely from anywhere consistently. Administrators can handle groups of machines by type, operating system, platform, department, geographical location or virtually any other distinguishing characteristic.

Combined with visibility into all IT assets and behavior systems, this accessibility allows policies based management systems. Administrators can set, monitor and update policies from a central console and leave them to machines distributed in the environment. Systems can fit in multiple groups and meet with various policies. It creates a focus on system management, which enables organizations to maintain a consistently healthy IT environment and with minimal impact on users.

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Automating the Maintenance and Troubleshooting

Many organizations already have some automation in their IT environments, usually in the form of monitoring and alerting. Usually, when there is an issue with any system components in the infrastructure, a flurry of emails sent to the IT team. However, you and an administrator cannot manually create a ticket and solve a problem. Regular maintenance is also done in much the same way – task by task, machine by machine.

The custom solutions and managed services of DedicatedSolutions can automate IT tasks that are recurrent such as patch management, the operation of software and implementing solutions and analysis of the cause. Our 24*7 Help Desk provides relevant performance information to managers as they are working on solving a problem and can even solve problems automatically without manual intervention.

The result is that management of IT is possible using a minimum amount of resources. Simultaneously, automation allows regular maintenance of organizations tasks to improve IT service levels, expand capacity and meet needs of new business initiatives while reducing costs.

Tangible Results Monitors

IT services that are providing management of IT tasks are one of the most important functions, but it is also inconsistent and consumes a significant quantity of time. Rather than being viewed as a cost center, IT needs to show the contributions they are making to business and the value of supporting business goals and initiatives.

DedicatedSolutions provides the platform to collect data relevant from distributed systems management, store the information in a central repository and report them to the concerned person. Because different audiences require various levels of technical detail, customizable reports of DedicatedSolutions ranging from executive summaries to snapshots system and detailed historical reports. And because data have already been collected in real time and have managed centrally, time to compiling reports is minimal.

An Integrated Platform

DedicatedSolutions gives IT organizations the visibility and control they need to manage effective and efficient distributed systems. Automation streamlines maintenance and troubleshooting to improve user productivity without increasing IT costs. Administrators can then leverage the visibility and control to validate the results, and the management can take advantage of the information to make accurate decisions. Our integrated platform consolidates all aspects of apparatus under a single administrative panel, standardizing maintenance, monitoring and troubleshooting across the organization.

Wrong Misconception About Managed Service Providers and Why You Should Care For MSP

Some organizations are hesitant to outsource the management of their hosting to a specialist provider, but it can provide many benefits if you do so. Unfortunately, some misconceptions deter organizations to choose a Managed Service Provider (MSP). In this blog, we refute some of these misconceptions.

Management by an MSP is More Expensive Than Doing it Yourself

People often think it is costlier to outsource the management of their hosting to a managed service provider than to do it yourself within the organization. Where often inadequate about being considered is that it often costs more money to take their own qualified people who can do this work. Furthermore, these people are hard to find, because they are very much in demand in the industry. To cope with illness and leave, you need more than one person needed. These people must be continually trained by the rapid changes in the market.

When choosing an MSP, you can rest assured that there is always someone who solves the work for you, when you want. You save on recruitment and personnel, and you can be confident that the work is performed by a multidisciplinary team of experts.

Managed Services Are Only For Only Large Organizations

It is often thought that managed hosting is only intended for large organizations because thousands of dollars per month would cost to manage the services. One of the main features of a managed hosting provider’s is to offer this scalability and, therefore, affordable solutions for both small and large organizations. MSP provides efficient, clear communication and can provide customer-friendly services at a competitive price.

It Is Only All or Nothing

Some organizations believe outsourcing of hosting is only possible when one outsources everything. It is not real because you can also choose to outsource some and keep some in-house. You choose which services you want to reduce the service level that suits your organization.

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A Private Location and Staff Provide Better Service

Before remote access, monitoring needs, and redundant cloud platforms were common, companies have their own location and its own staff possibly for better service. Today, this is largely superseded by the use of remote access cards, virtual consoles in cloud platforms and the redundant hardware infrastructure.

Incidentally, this does not mean that your own IT staff is redundant. On the contrary, many managed service providers work correctly closely with the staff of their clients and possibly also with third parties, such as developers. Organizations that extend the knowledge of their employees with the expertise of an MSP, often see an increase in the performance of their online business. By working as a team together, the strategy of the organization is managed, and the MSP provides the service and support.

All MSPs Deliver the Same, Only Different Prices

Many different parties managed hosting market, where prices vary widely. The term “managed hosting” is frequently used, but the service is supplied varies between suppliers. For a few bucks per month, you will, of course, get a different service than if you have a few hundred dollars a month to spend there. So it is important that you clearly have what you want exactly when you choose managed hosting.

DedicatedSolutions Managed Services Give You the Choice

The above misconceptions are just some examples of arguments that come forward not to opt for a managed service provider. If you choose managed hosting does it not mean that your platform and applications to be hosted on the infrastructure of the MSP.

DedicatedSolutions understand that each organization has different needs and requirements. We offer Custom Solutions that has a different focus and a different level of support. From a simple web server up to complex enterprise solutions such as database clusters, terminal server and communication software – we got you covered! We also offer custom consulting and implementation Services as part of our “Managed Services” offering.

Our network delivers 100% Uptime Guarantee with the best service to our customers while keeping the costs for our customers as low 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 1000% uptime – guaranteed.

DedicatedSolutions Data Center: Adding Value to Your Business

ManagedThe Data Center is one of the main topics of discussion at meetings of IT equipment worldwide. It is crucial for a company to work more efficiently and generate profits as firms rely heavily on an enormous amount of information stored in data processing centers. In this way, organizations are still trying to reduce costs through simplification and improvement of Data Centers.

Initiatives such as migration, deployment and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) are some of the first steps taken by the CIOs to increase the efficiency of data storage on a Data Center. The role of a data center in the designing, deploying and managing services play a crucial role in receiving high-performance results.

The data centers are enormously important in the present day for companies acting as e-commerce and sales, healthcare or any other business that depend on the systems to access patient information. To get an idea of the data center importance, 20% of data stored in data centers in the coming years will be linked to digital patient records. It will enable a surgeon to access information from a patient in the operating room itself or ambulances that have access to accurate data during a rescue.

With each passing year, data center brings many changes, developments and new technologies, especially in the area of storage and servers. For example, to support the new virtual environments found in cloud computing applications, it is necessary that data centers should provide tools and support energy with a dynamic, virtualized environment.

Therefore, the systems and infrastructure of the old data centers do not work as well as the latest facilities. Early systems were designed to a more stable environment, with fewer variation data storage and less scalability. Some early systems also lead to inactivity of a data center due to the following:

  • Human errors
  • lack of standard operating procedures (SOPs), operations maintenance protocol (MOP) and emergency procedures.
  • Lack of preventive measures, including testing and maintenance arrangements
  • Failure conservation or replace the uninterruptible power supply
  • Lack of redundancy, resulting in failures in systems using backups
  • Fault in cooling the data center

The Modern Data Center

The data center is a critical component of any IT department. Therefore, it is essential that data center is designed to deliver services flexibly and dynamically, following the currently required technology and sustainability trends.

Two essential characteristics of a data center are flexibility and scalability. These are necessary for almost all business activities currently online. Therefore, data center projects should be designed with an appropriate infrastructure to support all services and enterprise systems, so that it allows the perfect operation of the center and deliver future growth through adaptation to emerging technologies.

The modern data center infrastructure is designed to increase efficiency through lower energy expenditure, thus optimizing costs and security. These data centers meet some guidelines that the IT team can trust to mitigate system downtime. The service providers should be alert to improve the performance of data centers.

  • Build excellent facilities and establish a computerized maintenance program for each piece of equipment
  • Create a training program teams that define when and how a team should respond to the events of inactivity
  • Institute a quality assurance program that allows operation of local infrastructure as per customer expectations
  • Ensuring the physical protection of the site by building walls, doors and window to provide additional security against natural disasters.

Making full use of our technologies, you can achieve significant improvements in performance of the data center compared to the more common ones. These include:

  • Significant increase in performance of servers and storage systems
  • Energy saving
  • Reduction of licensing costs
  • Reducing the need for space in the computer centers
  • Significant optimization in the management of editing and release
  • Improvement of ROI (Return of Investment)

With many years of experience in the design and successful implementation of Data Center projects, DedicatedSolutions has helped many public and private organizations to transform their communications infrastructure and investment in IT infrastructure. DedicatedSolutions offers high availability and 100% uptime guaranteed! Your server will be hosted in a Tier III or Tier IV data center based on your choice. All data centers are SSAE16 certified, as well as PCI conform. Since we have multiple carriers at each data center location, we can guarantee you an 100% uptime on all our network connections! Besides the uptime, we also guarantee and warrant you that you will have unlimited bandwidth with our unlimited solutions.