A recent study claims that Irish companies are selling products and services online for a staggering €12million per day!
Think about this for a few moments … this is proof that, if done correctly, the online presence is not a luxury but can be the primary method for interacting with customers and partners. It’s not just for the Dell’s and Amazon’s of the world, but also for the small to medium business that needs to be able to deal with a global market.
This means that the IT infrastructure that runs the online application is now a critical company asset. It needs to perform well especially during peak periods such as December for retail operations. Being flexible with growth allows further capacity to be added as and when required and removed when the peak has subsided. The infrastructure needs to be highly available; the service being down during peaks is unacceptable to the business and generates a negative opinion in the market. The infrastructure needs to be 100% secure from the physical data centre, through the infrastructure and into the application. Customer data must be protected against prying eyes. Nothing could kill a business that relies on an online presence faster than the loss of private information.
With considerable effort and expense, any business can set up an IT infrastructure to meet these requirements. However, does your business want to get stronger at what it does and compete more efficiently or does it want to become an IT infrastructure service provider? It’s probably not the latter.
A managed hosting services company can provide you with the infrastructure already deployed and ready to meet your requirements. However, you need to be aware of what it is they are offering:
- Are they providing a “grey label” service with very attractive pricing? These are tipoffs for a service with no fault tolerance and probably not backed up with the 365 day * 4 hour response time support that your business will depend upon. Do you even know what country your data will be stored in? – that has data protection issues!
- On the face of it, they seem to offer a great service with 100% SLA’s. Dig a little deeper. What management are they really offering beyond a simple ping test? That 100% SLA, does their track record back it up? Outages every month or every two months surely would make you question their promises. Maybe they don’t use a data centre; maybe it’s just a computer room. There is a big difference between the levels of service they can offer.
- No matter what you ask for, do they have that offering? Do they fill the pages or the airwaves with buzz words and empty consulting speak? Ask yourself: Do they really have that offering and do they really know what they are talking about? Have you met their technical people before signing any contracts to find out how their technical offering will resolve your business needs?
- Are they just selling tin? Or worse: are they just selling virtual machines without performing the required due diligence consulting with you?
It’s clear that increasing globalisation and the competitive advantages that internet connectivity can provide if implemented correctly are steering businesses into deploying an online presence. You need the right application and the right IT infrastructure to make this work. With a little research you will find that outsourcing the infrastructure will:
- Decrease costs.
- Convert expenses into a predictable and budget friendly invoice.
- Vastly reduce times for implementation.
- Allow your business to focus on what it does best – usually not IT infrastructure!
Working with C Infinity allows you to get into the best data centre in Ireland and use the best IT infrastructure hardware, software and Internet connectivity at a fraction of the usual costs. This is because you are sharing those costs with the other clients of C Infinity. You get online quickly with a secure, reliable and managed solution. The real differentiator is that our experts will sit down with you to work on your requirements to be sure that the infrastructure you get is right for your business requirements.
If you would like to speak to us on how we can help your business please contact us.
Related posts:
