Business Accent

Managed Services: instant IT for your business

Giving your business an IT edge doesn't have to involve maintaining an army of network engineers. Hail Managed Services—the world of readymade servers, pre-cooked clusters, and instant karma.

Samartha Vashishtha

A recent media article argues that the term ‘information technology’ is now obsolete. The reasoning is simple—since most commerce today depends on IT to some extent, a better term would be ‘business technology’. One agrees to the fancy logic, but doesn’t that imply every business now should be expected to maintain a technical wing? Not necessarily, thanks to the recent trend of handing an entire IT infrastructure to experts who know how to maintain it best. Build my server, keep it running, update it, but trouble me not, say customers. Thank you very much.

Whither servers, whither heat?

Full-blown managed services can involve the outsourcing of the entire IT operations of an organisation—complete with hardware, development efforts, maintenance, trouble-shooting, support and upgradation. With time, more organisations are realising that even maintaining a small in-house team of techies does not deliver the goods. Modern businesses expect high uptime from their IT infrastructure. For instance, a chain of hotels offering centralised booking of rooms requires its WAN backbone to be continuously available.

Moreover, high-performance servers can often be clumsy, fire-breathing monsters. They cost a fortune and require impeccable housing facilities to function properly. Companies specialising in maintaining IT infrastructure usually club hardware serving many customers at a single, closely-monitored IT facility organised into racks and rails. These are usually also provided with multi-tier power back-up and connectivity—measures critical to maximise availability. Proper heat management measures are taken, and the customer is updated if services need to be suspended for a while for upgradation and maintenance. Ever imagined a place full of neatly-combed servers toiling round the clock? Welcome to the data centre.

Managed boxes, packaged deals

An increasing number of concerns are recognising the value of the expertise that managed services companies bring to the table. The technology challenges involved in e-enabling a business vary across industry verticals, and so do the solutions. For instance, the needs of a Web site offering online match-making services are miles apart from those of a grocery store-chain looking to tap Net-savvy customers. The Web is just an ancillary technology for the latter; for the former, it is bread and butter.

The managed services model tries to build a solution around the deliverables expected. The service provider analyses client requirements and takes the necessary decisions on his behalf. Let’s take another look at the example—our match-making Web site waiting to go live may ask a provider to buy the relevant hardware, choose the operating system and the software technologies that need to be deployed, and finally house the server at its own data centre. Then there are certain specialised processes that even IT companies choose to outsource. Modern businesses generate data by the terabyte, and all of it needs to be kept secure and made available in a snap. Back-ups are most effective when stored offsite, and need specialised recovery techniques in the event of a failure. Additionally, companies specialising in disaster recovery methodologies make available sufficient redundancy for guarding critical data.

Managed services often come branded as a bouquet of offerings—right from deployment advice and maintenance of facilities to disaster recovery services and technical support. Services can be managed either directly by engineers at the data centre or through remote access technologies such as VNC or Citrix Metaframe. The latter facilitates outsourcing of service management on a global scale. Governed by the terms laid down in the SLA (service level agreement), the provider guarantees the client a specific uptime, and levies a lump-sum fee and monthly charge. Any violation of the terms of the SLA translates into discounts and reimbursements for the customer. Many managed services firm even offer a money-back option if a client’s expectations are not met.

Co-location: sardines in a can

So you are a compulsive geek who knows setting up a server is not exactly rocket-science. You know which applications fit the bill perfectly, and how to get them to work. But are you ready for the power cuts, malware attacks and the frantic midnight calls? Relax, you can build your server yourself, and then have it housed at a co-location centre offering controlled environments designed to maximise availability.

Co-location can be managed or unmanaged. Managed co-location is similar to managed services, except for the fact that the hardware is usually owned by the client instead of the provider. On the other hand, unmanaged co-location is similar to renting rack space for servers, and offers the client greater control over configuration. Co-location centres too are provided with fail-proof connectivity and power supply.

A closer look at disaster recovery

If you’ve been wondering all the while, backing up your critical data on tapes, CDs or DVDs isn’t as safe as it seems. Even maintaining a back-up server in-house, cumbersome as it is, will not help in the event of a full-blown disaster. This is the primary reason for people opting to store their data in a third-party data centre. Often, the SLAs for data recovery services also outline the level of physical security that the provider will ensure for the back-up servers. Usually, equipment is monitored 24x7 using closed-circuit surveillance techniques. The confidentiality of the client business is also maintained by ensuring that the technical staff can view just ‘data’ and not ‘information.’ Your proposals are a potent weapon if they fall into the wrong hands; encrypted streams of data that read like nonsense aren’t.

Another critical question you should ask yourself before deciding to maintain back-ups in-house is whether the data will be retrievable at will. You may need to maintain an inventory of the back-up media, and sifting through heaps of plastic isn’t quite pleasant when you’ve just had a data crash. Data centres are usually equipped with sophisticated retrieval technologies—even clandestine proprietary tools—that make the recovery of relevant data easy. It is way simpler to access a remote server presenting organised lists of your files than suddenly realising you forgot to label a couple of back-up discs.

And the bottom-line is

Whether you are a corporate satrap or a budding entrepreneur, chances are you wouldn’t want a fuming inferno in the backyard of your air-conditioned office. Managed services are a cost-effective and foolproof way to put your business on the fast track, and offer solutions that meet your exact needs. While enterprises in the developing world are slowly waking up to the many benefits that this approach brings, the West is growing comfortable with the idea of entrusting complex technology infrastructure to distant, safe hands. There are a number of industry players you can bank on. If you’ve always wanted to give your company that flashy Web site or an incredible database, a quick Google search for ‘managed services’ or ‘co-location’ will do the trick for you.

The author is a technical writer, poet and freelance technical journalist.
An online anthology of his creative writings can be accessed at www.samartha.tk