To Host or Not To Host?  That Is The Question.

There has been lots of talk regarding hosting services to run your business. What would the reasons be for these services? What are the issues or concerns? Is this the way to go for your business?

In brief, the reasons: The major claim for these services is to reduce IT expenses by consolidating your system and not having to have your own IT staff available for support. They claim: “With managed hosting, you get all the flexibility you need to customize your operating system, servers and devices without having to troubleshoot, patch, monitor, backup or worry about the hardware and network. Our experts do all of that for you around the clock.”

Issues or concerns: We raise the question of how risky do you feel it may be to move your operations to these locations. Do you really think your IT problems and cost will go completely away or be reduced by moving in this direction? When you have an application network issue, how confident do you feel that your issue will be addressed in a reasonable amount of time? Will your systems run as fast in this environment?

Also, how easy and cost effective would it be for your company to move your IT operations back to your location if you are not satisfied with the results once you’ve made this transition?

The way to go or not: In almost all cases, ECMSI feels it is NOT. ECMSI feels it is more stable, cheaper and more productive for your business to control your own IT environment at your site as long as you’ve partnered with the right technology firm.

The bottom line is that you will always have technology costs related to your business. Every business is dependant on IT and technology is vital for your company to be highly productive and have a competitive edge. ECMSI is a managed service provider that believes the best options for its customers is an internal infrastructure with fixed fee services. Why fixed fee? Simple - it’s a win-win solution. Our customer’s priorities are controlled costs while keeping their employees productive. And our goal is to keep our customers up and running, so that we don’t have to send out network technicians to make repairs when they could have been prevented in the first place.

Being a managed IT solutions provider, we are challenged with staffing for the unpredictability of problems. Without fixed fee solutions, response time will suffer. Proactive services doesn’t mean that there will not be downtime due to unforeseen hardware or software issues; however, we can guarantee we will be able to reduce downtime significantly by keeping your environment secure and protected with our proactive approach. Also, with those unforeseen downtime or issues, your company will be on a fixed fee agreement meaning that you will have no additional IT labor expense. This is a key for budgeting your IT cost.

We pride ourselves with being the area’s leading IT solution provider with a helpdesk that is here for our partners 24/7. With our fixed fee services, we provide the peace of mind that we are staying proactive to keep our customers up and running. Many times, it is very difficult to put a cost on downtime; however, no matter what the number is, I can guarantee that our fixed fee costs are lower. Our focus is clear under fixed fee services. It’s to manage our customer’s network to create a low cost of ownership for our partners. If you have any questions regarding our services, ECMSI would love to sit down and create a long lasting partnership with you.