Why go Hosted?
When choosing a new IT system, knowing whether to stick with an in-house system, or to outsource some or all of your IT to an external hosting company can be confusing. The cost comparisons can also be confusing and unclear when initially looked at. Below are just a few high-level reasons why you should consider a hosted solution, rather than an in-house solution.
Costs:
Our hosted solution will give you fixed costs that are scalable and will grow/shrink as you do. These costs are low, predictable and therefore easy to budget.
An in-house solution will involve a large initial investment, often up to several thousand pounds including the hardware, software, licenses, IT resources and the time required to setup. The ongoing maintenance costs can also be unpredictable as in-house staff are not always aware of IT best practice, which can cause issues with long term support.
Resources:
With our hosted solution, no dedicated IT resources are needed. Simple user maintenance such as password resets can be carried out, online, by a non-technical person, plus a dedicated support number is available where highly trained (and friendly) staff are available to help. This allows staff to focus on your core business, rather than fixing IT related problems.
An in-house solution can require a dedicated IT resource, or it can take a non dedicated resource away from their day-to-day job to fix IT issues.
Deployment:
Our hosted solution will allow you to get setup straight away. Our team will work out the best time to carry out the transfer, setup your accounts and help you with transferring data across from your existing system to your new one. We have experience in moving small to large companies, and know the common issues that occur, and how to resolve them quickly and efficiently.
An new in-house solution can take up to four weeks to purchase, setup and deploy, with the inherent teething problems that comes with setting up a new system.
Maintenance:
Our hosted solution is kept up-to-date with all of the latest security patches and updates. We have redundant systems in place, so should there be a failure, the customer facing service won’t be affected.
An in-house solution is normally not setup with any kind of redundancy, so any downtime will result in all services being unavailable until the solution is brought back up. Other issues that can come about with a local solution are security patches not being applied, lack of administration, lack of bandwidth or other problems with your Internet connection that can cause the service to be unreliable, slow or unavailable.
Backups:
Our hosted solution is fully backed up; using multiple backup systems to ensure that your data is kept safe and is available should there be any kind of problem. We also keep backup and live data in separate locations, so in the worst case scenario a copy of your data is kept safe and will still be accessible quickly.
In-house backups are frequently setup and then never tested to confirm that the backup systems are in place. A backup that hasn’t been tested to confirm it is working can give a false sense of security, and be disastrous should critical data be lost. Another question to ask yourself is: Are your backup drives kept next to your server? What will happen to your data should there be a fire, will you lose all of your live and backed up data?
Security:
Our hosted solution is kept up-to-date with the latest security patches to maintain the highest levels of security, with multiple levels of firewalls to keep you and your data safe.
An in-house solution requires constant maintenance to keep viruses and SPAM out of your system.
For more information, call us on 0117 933 0570 or fill in our contact form and we’ll get back to you.