fbpx
mobile-logo

Use IaaS to Elevate Your Business Potential and Security with Public Cloud Managed Services

04 Apr

Use IaaS to Elevate Your Business Potential and Security with Public Cloud Managed Services

by itro support
in Cloud Computing, IT Security, itro News
Comments

IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) is a public cloud managed service you can use to elevate your business potential and enhance your cyber security – when utilised correctly!

What is IaaS?

Infrastructure as a Service gives you instant access to essential IT resources such as servers, networking, and storage over the internet, on demand, through a ‘pay-as-you-go’ pricing model. It’s flexible, scalable, and eliminates the need for your Practice or business to maintain and manage your own IT infrastructure. 

There are several leading IaaS providers to weigh up: Microsoft Azure vs Amazon Web Services (AWS) vs Google Cloud Platform (GCP). The advanced security resources available to these global providers can be utilised to help you minimise the risk of data breaches, cyber-attacks, and other security threats to your business. 

The benefits to using cloud storage and IaaS in your organisation are many, but there are also challenges you need to be aware of.

Challenges to using IaaS

Care needs to be taken that you get the full technical and cyber storage benefits from your subscription. Challenges of migrating to a cloud service – private or public – can include the following: 

  • Unexpected Costs: If poorly managed, monthly fees can add up, or peak usage may be more than you expect.  
  • Security Risks: While IaaS providers are responsible for securing their infrastructure, you retain responsibility to back up what you store with them online. Vulnerabilities that may arise from the loss of direct control over onsite resources need to be clearly identified and addressed prior to your migration. 
  • Complex Integration: Challenges that come with networking existing systems 
  • Lack of internal support resources: You may not have the depth of or available IT resources required to manage the complexities of your migration and subscription. 
  • Public versus Private Cloud Managed Services: Whilst public cloud services such as Azure ensure you always retain full ownership and transportability of your data, migrating from a private IaaS provider to another can be challenging, and often very costly. 
  • Process Changes: IaaS may require changes to your processes and workflows 
  • Limited Customization: You may have limited ability and control to customize your subscription. 
  • Managing Availability: Even the largest service providers experience downtime. 
  • Confusing SLAs: Service level agreements (SLAs) can be difficult to understand. 
  • Regulatory Uncertainty: Evolving federal and state laws can impact some industries’ use of IaaS, especially across country borders. 

5 key advantages to using IaaS

  1. Cost savings

Cost savings is one of the most significant advantages you can derive from IaaS. Firstly, you are no longer responsible for buying and maintaining on-premises servers, data storage centres, and networking equipment. Secondly, IaaS changes your IT expenditure model from being CapEx to OpEx.  

  1. Resource flexible and scalability

IaaS is designed to scale quickly to meet various workload demands. For example, IaaS can easily be scaled up to meet new business needs, unexpected and seasonal spikes in resource demands.  

It enables you to deliver IT resources to your teams anywhere in the world faster with enhanced application performance. For example, you may want to bring a new product or service to market. With a limited budget, you can easily build an IT infrastructure in a matter of hours through virtual machines (VMs) without the time delays and costs of provisioning physical servers.  

  1. Improved performance and security, plus increased business continuity and disaster recovery

The availability and continuity of services offered by premium managed cloud providers, such as multi-factor authentication (MFA), built in encryption protocols and redundancy levels, is well beyond the budget and internal resources of small to medium businesses. Multiple network connections, power supplies and cooling systems of IaaS data centres minimise productivity interruptions to your team. 

With users able to access applications and data from any location with internet, IaaS enables your team to continue to operate as usual and access data during a disaster or inability to access physical office premises. 

Note: Whilst leading IaaS providers such as Microsoft are committed to ensuring the availability and continuity of services, technical problems, even cyber-attacks, can happen to any organisation.  

  1. More freedom to innovate and grow faster

If you decide to launch a new product or initiative, the necessary computing infrastructure can be ready in minutes or hours, rather than days or weeks. As well as delivering resources faster, IaaS gives business leaders the freedom to step away from day to day and complex discussions of managing technology and spend to focus on core business innovations and priorities. 

Managed Service Providers (MSPs) and IaaS

MSPs, like IaaS, exist to proactively help Partners, internal IT Managers and business leaders manage the headaches and complexities of IT and cyber security and keep their teams working efficiently and safely for a set monthly fee.   

Importantly, outsourced Cloud and Managed Services give small to medium businesses more for less. You gain the immediate benefit of a team of engineers with extensive experience managing on-premises and cloud resources. And you save on costs and delays associated with hiring and upskilling for time sensitive or one-off projects. 

The Riverland Group Case Study 

An excellent current example of how a MSP helps small to medium organisations safely migrate to a public Azure cloud service is that of The Riverland Group. The Riverland Group, a leading hospitality company operating 6 venues across Melbourne, faced a challenge. Outdated data networking capabilities were killing their team’s performance and cyber security. After a careful review of potential MSPs, they chose itro to move their existing data to the public Azure cloud services and Office 365. The move and itro’s all-inclusive managed services plan, itro Ultimate, has been a game-changer for them. Improved security, a ‘work-from-anywhere’ environment and new infrastructure has significantly improved each venue’s level of service to patrons and ability to attract the best staff. 

Click here to view a short video that outlines how MSP itro migrated Riverland and see what’s possible with the right IT partner. Or read the full case study here. 

The Riverland Group’s Finance Manager, Rohan Brodie, says having itro in place as their MSP means the Group can continue to invest in new technologies and services as they emerge in the future. “We don’t have a dedicated in-house IT team and so itro provides us with the level of technical expertise needed to keep our infrastructure running. They also keep an eye on what we might need in the future as the business grows.”

Expertise makes all the difference with cloud migrations

Getting the right advice on what, if any, cloud services best serve your business needs shapes the degree of benefit you will get from cloud migration services. 

A primary benefit of IaaS is cost savings, however a common issue MSP itro comes across in advising new clients is oversubscription to virtual servers in the cloud. For example, based on poor advice or limited understanding of IaaS, some businesses are paying for too many servers in the cloud for their data storage needs. Oversubscribing to virtual services is a quick way to blow out your monthly costs. Whilst you may only be using 25% of your requested storage capacity, you pay for 100% of what was originally ordered.  

Another issue itro commonly identifies as an unnecessary cost to businesses is failure to turn off virtual resources not in use. Unfortunately, oversight may not be the only reason this happens. MSPs benefit from how much a customer spends. It’s easy, and financially rewarding, for an MSP to deploy more resources (servers) on behalf of a business than required.  

Successful management of your IaaS subscription is all about streamlining your resources: only using what you need. Unless your subscription is well designed and managed, it will cost you more, create new security issues, and be unreliable.

A cloud and managed services partner you can trust

In helping small to medium businesses migrate to the cloud, itro focuses on consolidating the resources you have or need. We know from experience it’s always best to start with only what you need, as we can always help you scale up at any time. We look at ways to consolidate your resources, for example getting rid of servers you don’t need, and/or combining server roles (such as combining your Domain Controller with your File Server).

From ZNetLive Blog: https://www.znetlive.com/blog/what-is-iaas-and-benefits-of-iaas/

Another easy way itro can help you gain significant Azure cloud savings is committing to subscribe to a server for one (1) year. Azure’s 1-year Reserved Server Instance gives you approximately 40% discount on your Azure Compute costs. Check out how itro can optimise your Azure environment. 

Whether you choose our all-inclusive remote and onsite fixed price Managed Support Plan, itro Ultimate, or our remote fixed price Plan, itro Advanced, we know we can help you elevate your business potential and cyber security.  

We are the icing on your IaaS cake!

Tags:
,,,,,,,,,,
No Comments

Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.