Your IT infrastructure - Small and medium business Web Hosting

This is an IT related post, but it's relevant and beneficial for those who are looking for web hosting services.

After years of doing IT Infrastructure projects, some of the biggest challenges and pain points faced by my customers are hardware acquisition and building a team of competent IT engineers to manage the infrastructure. Requesting for new computer hardware alone might take as long as 6 months for approval. Just imagine a department or division that are planning to roll out a very important application but have to wait for almost a year before it can be provisioned and used by their end users. By the time the system stabilizes, some of the software components might need some upgrades.

When the infrastructure is successfully provisioned, then comes the operational headaches. For a simple secured web based application, it takes at least 5 components or software products to be managed by an organization. This alone might take 3 competent System Administrators to maintain. If a few more applications are deployed, and on different sets of software technology, the same people will need to be multiskilled and perform multitasks in their day to day job. This eventually caused inefficiency and lead to knowledge workers' frustration. They end up looking for jobs elsewhere.

There were times when I'd advice my friends or acquaintances to opt for web hosting that are secure, reliable and able to meet their service levels. If I were in their shoes, I'd rather keep a few really good engineers who can focus on their special areas while leaving the infrastructure headaches to another party who can provide the hardware and skillful people. This managed hosting is getting popular now as many more organizations realize the value and have increased confidence level. Some companies opt for managed services to reduce software licensing headaches as they're getting more complex with the advancement of hardware technology such as virtualization.

For organizations that own IT infrastructure also have the choice to operate with less headaches by doing colocation where they can enjoy having more secured network and their servers are placed in a better data center.

In my day to day job, I don't only sell hardware and services. At times, I do share informations like this with my customers especially the options available today for them to maximise their IT investment.