Business critical applications are those that allow your business to function smoothly on a daily basis. While the business will not fold immediately if these applications experience downtime, they give your staff the ability to efficiently manage and grow your business. To qualify as business critical, these applications must be core to the business’s operation and must be running 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 capable of managing the complex and unique requirements of business critical applications can be a complicated, expensive, and time-consuming proposition for most companies. If your business is looking for a managed hosting environment that is familiar with the management of business critical applications, call Volico today to speak with an IT consultant about your company’s specific needs. Read on if you are interested in learning more about what goes into creating a managed hosting environment complex enough to efficiently manage all business critical applications.
Understanding Managed Hosting
Managed hosting is the service model wherein a managed hosting provider leases out a dedicated set of servers and hardware to a single client. This service provider is responsible for housing the hardware needed for the hosting server and for the maintenance and management of the equipment. Clients will generally interact with the software through a user-facing, web-based interface. And while clients might sometimes be granted administrative access, they rarely use it. The main characteristic that differentiates managed hosting from other dedicated hosting services is the fact that the hosting provider owns the hardware, the server, and the operating systems. They simply lease the usage of these servers and operating systems out to clients without any transferring of ownership. Given the complexity of operating systems and the associated hardware, businesses without an-in house staff of expert IT technicians find it highly effective to hire an outsourced provider to set up and configure the hardware and software, provide technical support, install patches, and manage daily monitoring.
Requirements for Managed Hosting Environments for Business Critical Applications
There are four generally accepted requirements for creating a managed hosting service. These spell out the needed availability, security and disaster recovery measures, and the level of staffing present in these data centers.
- High Availability Architecture. Architecture needs to be created in a way that ensures that no failure of any one component could cause a shutdown of the entire network.
- Comprehensive Security Systems. Business critical applications are the lifeline of your company. An effectively managed hosting provider must offer clients a comprehensive set of security capabilities that are designed specifically to protect them 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 hosting services that will keep your business up and running the event of a cyber-attack or national disaster.
- 24/7 Expert Management. All of the above applications, processes, and protocols necessitate an experienced team of IT professionals working around the clock to monitor, troubleshoot, and manage your business’s cloud network. A managed hosting service provider enables businesses to outsource those staffing needs to highly trained experts in the IT field at a fraction of what it would cost to hire that team in-house.
Finding a Managed Hosting Provider in Your Region
While some businesses opt for in-house server management, most are looking to cut costs while increasing efficiency. For these businesses, turning over the responsibilities of managing the very networks their business relies on to function makes financial and logistical sense. If your business is looking to work with a managed hosting provider, call Volico today at (888) 865-4261 to speak with a managed hosting expert about getting started.
