Business critical applications are those that allow your business to function smoothly on a daily basis. The business won’t fold immediately if these applications go down. But they give your staff the ability to manage and grow the business efficiently. To qualify as business critical, applications must be core to the business’s operation. They also need to run efficiently during all business hours. For online retailers, this often means that these applications must be running 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
Creating a hosting environment that can manage these complex requirements is a complicated, expensive, and time-consuming proposition for most companies. If your business needs a managed hosting environment experienced with business critical applications, call Volico today. Our IT consultants can talk through your company’s specific needs. Read on to learn what goes into building a managed hosting environment that can handle your business critical applications.
Understanding Managed Hosting
Managed hosting is a service model where a provider leases a dedicated set of servers and hardware to a single client. The service provider houses the hardware for the hosting server and handles its maintenance and management. Clients will generally interact with the software through a user-facing, web-based interface. Clients might occasionally receive administrative access, but they rarely use it.
What sets managed hosting apart from other dedicated hosting services is ownership. The provider owns the hardware, server, and operating systems. They simply lease the usage of these servers and operating systems out to clients without any transferring of ownership. Operating systems and their hardware are complex. Because of that, businesses without in-house IT technicians often find it more effective to hire an outsourced provider instead. That provider sets up and configures the hardware and software, provides technical support, installs patches, and manages daily monitoring.
Requirements for Managed Hosting Environments for Business Critical Applications
There are four generally accepted requirements for creating a managed hosting service. These cover the availability, security, and disaster recovery measures needed, plus the level of staffing present in these data centers.
- High Availability Architecture. Architecture must ensure that no single component failure can shut down the entire network. This is the same principle behind the Uptime Institute’s Tier Classification System for data center reliability.
- Comprehensive Security Systems. Business critical applications are the lifeline of your company. An effectively managed hosting provider offers a comprehensive set of security capabilities designed to protect clients from hackers and other cyber threats.
- Disaster Recovery Capability. A managed hosting provider must offer a comprehensive disaster recovery plan that includes redundancy, backup generators, and other disaster recovery services. That plan keeps your business up and running in the event of a cyberattack or natural disaster.
- 24/7 Expert Management. All of these applications, processes, and protocols require an experienced team of IT professionals working around the clock. They monitor, troubleshoot, and manage your business’s cloud network. A managed hosting provider lets businesses outsource that staffing to highly trained IT experts. This costs a fraction of building that team in-house.
Finding the Right IT Partner in Your Region
While some businesses opt for in-house server management, most are looking to cut costs while increasing efficiency. For these businesses, handing over network management to experts makes financial and logistical sense. If your business wants to work with a managed hosting provider, call Volico today at (305) 735-8098. Our team can help you get started.
