5 Benefits of Hosted IT Services for SMBs

Hosted IT services can be delivered in a few different ways, but first things first: When IT support providers say they offer small businesses an array of “hosted IT services,” what they’re really talking about is “The Cloud.”

The Cloud is familiar to most small business owners because all the ways it makes their technology easier to manage, saves them money, and improves their employees’ output are well advertised.

But what may not be so clear are the implementation options once you’ve decided to migrate your in-house IT to The Cloud. Let’s take a look at two of the platforms you can choose from for your hosted IT services.

Two Types of Hosted IT Services

There are a few different ways cloud providers can deliver their hosted IT services, and two of them are particularly relevant to SMBs.

The first is called Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). This is where your employees would connect to your provider’s data center to access their email, backed-up data, and software apps over the Internet, rather than accessing them on a local server in your office. Common examples of SaaS would be Google Apps or Dropbox, which both simplify collaboration and document sharing between users and make them more productive.

The second type of cloud platform small-business owners usually consider is called Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS). This is where data storage, virtualized servers and desktops, and many other IT tools are also made available over the Internet. Common examples of IaaS include Amazon Web Services (AWS) or Microsoft Azure, both of which will reduce your hardware and software costs and practically eliminate your IT management responsibilities.

Five Key Benefits of IaaS

The advantages of migrating your in-house network to The Cloud go beyond savings and no-hassle maintenance. Here are a few of the key benefits of hosted IT services:

• Simplicity - Not only does IaaS significantly reduce the burden of maintaining an in-house IT network, it makes setting things up in the first place much simpler. A platform like AWS can have you set up with your apps and data in the cloud within minutes.
• Scalability - You can add users in any location on demand, providing them logins and instant access to your systems. This can be of huge consequence when you need more production and customer service in a pinch, such as during seasonal influxes of customers, new product releases, etc.
• Data Backups - Installing, optimizing, and managing a robust data-backup system takes expertise, time, and money, and doing it right can be the difference between your business surviving or failing should you ever experience a server crash or ransomware attack. But when your data is hosted in the cloud, everything will be automated and there will be no server crashes or data breaches.
• Disaster Recovery - Running your apps & data on in-house servers leaves you susceptible to not only server crashes, but also the possibility of failing to get them back online fast once the dust has settled. IaaS providers will store your data on redundant servers in the cloud so no matter what sort of natural disaster hits Southern California, you’ll experience no downtime.
• Savings - We’d be remiss to simply assert that huge savings are to be had, so let’s put this in perspective. Expanding your IT network from one server, five software apps, and twenty users to two servers, ten software apps, and forty users will double your IT spend if you do it yourself in-house. However, if you were to expand by 100% on an IaaS plan, your IT spend would increase by a mere twenty user licenses, charged at a low, fixed monthly rate that covers everything!

The upshot of migrating your in-house IT infrastructure to a cloud-hosted IaaS platform is that your office technology will be easier to maintain, your users will have reliable 24/7 access, it will cost you less on a monthly basis, and it will be managed round-the-clock by professional technicians.

Call today to learn more about SaaS, IaaS, and another of our “as-a-Service” offerings called HaaS, which provides all the benefits of IaaS plus all your hardware, too.