Hosted services are some of the most powerful tools available to growing businesses of almost any size and are one of the essential IT services available to businesses in today’s market. A wide variety of functions fall under the hosted services umbrella, to the point that many have questions about what exactly constitutes a hosted service, and what working with a hosted services provider means for a business. It’s important to know what hosted services are, but it’s nearly as crucial to understand what hosted services aren’t.
When a business works with an IT service provider like Centre Technologies to make use of hosted services, the result is that most of your business’s IT needs will be handled via offsite servers. That means that website hosting, data storage, and virtualized workspaces (among other things) will be hosted far away from your business’s brick and mortar location.
This may cause some apprehension, but there is no reason for concern. Hosted services don’t take the ability to access and work with all the same information and programs that your business is acclimated to, nor do they create any sort of impediment to access. There is almost no tangible difference between using hosted services and working with your own network infrastructure, and your budget will thank you.
Perhaps the most natural and understandable reservation to have about hosted services is how working with a third party for data storage might impact your business’s security. There’s good news: if anything, hosted services are even more secure than working with your own network infrastructure.
Responsible IT service providers are on the bleeding edge of cyber security. Part of our job is to stay updated on the latest threats and security trends and be proactive in protecting our clients’ information. Your business depends on the trust of its clients, and we rely on the trust of our own. As such, security is always our top priority, as it should be for any hosted services provider.
Many successful people buy into the idea that paying someone to do something that you can do yourself isn’t a cost-effective course of action. That often isn’t the case with technology, however. Most businesses in the world need the benefits associated with building a network, but actually doing so would require time, space, manpower, and lots and lots of money to be spent on hardware, software and maintenance.
Most companies reside in a grey area in which they are dependent on technology to survive and thrive but it’s not cost effective to build a custom network infrastructure. For these businesses, hosted services are the logical solution. We live in an exciting time where nearly every business can leverage technology in innovative ways. At Centre Technologies, we’re committed to helping your business reach its potential through IT solutions, and we’d love to sit down with you and discuss the possibilities.