Managed Hosting Best Practices from Addteq

Enterprises across the world have long been depending on their IT department to carry out day-to-day IT operations. Although most of these services are provided by a team of internal IT experts, as organizations grow beyond geographies and serve customers across sectors, relying on an in-house team for end-to-end management of IT is no longer sustainable. As IT becomes a key driver for enterprise transformation, organizations need to opt for professional Managed Services for efficient, timely, and continuous management of IT. This way, they can improve uptime, reduce delivery risk and cost, increase throughput and accelerate time to market.

Why organizations need Managed Hosting

The pace at which organizations are growing today is tremendous, bringing with it the need for modern and sophisticated IT infrastructure. But, building and managing this complex web of IT systems such as enterprise platforms, LOB systems, data analytics solutions, networking systems is time-consuming and tedious – especially for those not in the business of IT. Since most internal IT teams aren’t equipped to keep up with this pace of growth and innovation, the approach to IT is slow and reactive.

There are several reasons why organizations today need managed hosting to meet the fluctuating demands in today’s constantly evolving digital world:

Infrastructure to scale: As organizations grow, their existing IT systems are unable to keep up with the growth due to poor scalability.
Internal purchase approvals: The decision to invest in costly IT systems often requires several levels of purchase approvals – which isn’t easy.
TCO evaluation: Making the right IT investment decisions needs careful TCO planning and evaluation, which in-house teams often struggle with.
Upgrades and day-to-day maintenance: Upgrades and day-to-day maintenance contributes to a large chunk of the in-house team’s responsibilities – but carrying these tasks regularly means they are left with no time for performing the more critical IT activities.
Not a core business of managing tools and technology: For organizations that aren’t in the field of IT, managing the array of old and new tools and technologies becomes a Herculean task. Lack of expertise in DevOps and Agile practices: In today’s highly dynamic world, reacting quickly to market trends and customer demands is the need of the hour. But because internal IT teams often lack the expertise in DevOps and Agile practices, they find it difficult to keep up with the pace of business.
Audits requiring specific compliance framework: Given how complex today’s IT systems have become, carrying out regular audits is critical. But by in-house IT teams often lack the knowledge of various compliance frameworks, which makes auditing difficult.
Satisfaction level with the current service provider: If the current provider is unable to maintain a strong foundation of IT or cannot deal with issues efficiently, opting for an expert managed hosting partner is a great way to boost IT and business outcomes.
Need for migration assistance: To keep up with the pace of digital transformation, many organizations need migration assistance, which in-house teams fail to provide.

For complex IT infrastructures, opting for managed hosting is a great way to overcome the many challenges of day-to-day management. Including a variety of factors from enabling the right IT decisions to offering scalable and high-performing systems; minimizing CapEx to delivering the latest updates/patches; and finally, providing seamless access to required tools to planning migrations, training users, and supporting the new ecosystem.

Factors to Consider when Evaluating a Managed Hosting Provider

Given the many benefits managed hosting provides, organizations big and small are looking to get a partner on board to strengthen their IT footing, manage risk and compliance, and enhance their competitive position. But choosing the ideal managed hosting Provider requires careful evaluation of several factors:

While evaluating potential managed hosting Providers, one of the first things to consider is whether they are local or offshore. This is important as it allows you to understand how IT services will be delivered to you and how easily the provider can provide onsite assistance if any issues are reported.
Assessing the ideal managed hosting Provider also requires you to understand the IT best practices they follow. Since IT is no longer just a mere department but a critical driver of successful business operations, the partner you choose must follow a strong set of IT best practices to efficiently achieve business goals.
Understanding of the industry-specific level of service the partner in consideration provides is, likewise, just as important. Since every industry operates in a unique way, such consideration will allow you to gauge the expertise and efficiency with which the provider will be able to deal with processes and issues that are specific to your particular industry.
Given how diverse the IT ecosystem is becoming, assessing the provider’s technical capabilities across different platforms is also extremely important. Such assessment provides much-needed insight into the efficiency with which the provider can manage your legacy foundation, enterprise systems, end-points, networks, security, and more.
It is important to ascertain knowledge of the Regulatory Compliance of the provider in question. Such an assessment can help gauge how well the provider understands the compliance requirements of your industry and the tools they use to ensure round-the-clock compliance.
The decision of choosing a managed hosting provider also requires you to understand their take on Data Protection and Accountability. Partnering with a provider with strong Backup, Restore and Disaster Recovery processes means your systems can perform consistently, your data is always backed up and safe, and your end-user experience is always seamless.
Given the pace with which new products and new features need to be introduced, assessing the provider’s microservice offerings is important. This can provide much-needed insight into how well the provider can build, sustain, and grow a microservices-based architecture and deliver the capabilities your users expect.
Amongst other things, price is also a major consideration when it comes to selecting the right managed hosting Partner. Choosing a partner like Addteq means you can make the most of low and flexible pricing contracts and glean maximum value from the IT service they provide – in a cost-effective way.
If you’re looking to become a digital-first organization, you will need to move away from your legacy infrastructure which requires the provider you choose to have exceptional migration expertise. Such expertise means you can have access to ideal migration tools and best practices while ensuring all issues are handled most efficiently.
SLAs are also a key factor for consideration in choosing a provider that’s right for your business. Such an assessment will help you get insight into the time it will take for the provider to receive and respond to issues, so the business can operate – without major disruption to IT service. Partnering with companies like Addteq means you’re in safe hands! Addteq guarantees 99.95% availability of the hosting services with 24x7x365 monitoring.
The managed hosting Provider should also be evaluated on technical strengths in product development and security. Since products today need to be brought to the market quickly and need to offer the required levels of security, such assessment will help evaluate the provider’s capability of reaching your time-to-market goals in a secure and efficient manner.
Evaluating providers based on Case Studies and Testimonials are a great way to weigh up their capabilities. While case studies can help in understanding the provider’s expertise in your particular industry, testimonials can help throw light into how trustworthy, cost-effective, and capable the provider in question is.
Assessing a managed hosting provider based on the whitepapers and blogs published is also often important. This helps in understanding the technical expertise of the provider as well as in understanding how updated they are with the latest trends in the industry. With the global managed services market expected to grow from $223.0 billion in 2020 to $329.1 billion by 2025, the growth of this all-encompassing IT services model is obvious!