As the CIO of your company you are plagued with many concerns that can impact your business influentially. The challenges of providing quality services faster in the market within a limited budget, ensuring a safe environment for storage of confidential business information, providing support for both internal and external customers, aligning the IT processes with the business objectives and optimizing the IT infrastructure to gain maximum benefits are overwhelming. The IT infrastructure that you employ should have the capabilities to respond positively to the changing requirements. It should provide a flexible platform that facilitates integration amongst the processes.

The IT infrastructure management service model has moved on from rental servers in a remote data center to customized and standardized services across varied environments. The IT infrastructure management service today is a cloud based process that gives you the benefit of paying only for the IT services that you use, thereby controlling your costs. You require a collaborative service model that provides remote infrastructure management services and facilitates an onshore-offshore model for service deliveries. Here are few pointers that will help you assess the qualities of a befitting service platform

* Agility

The worth of an ideal model can be gauged by its ability to provide quality services consistently while adapting to the changing demands in the environment. A versatile IT infrastructure that can smoothly incorporate the changes provides your business a competitive edge.

* Efficiency

The IT infrastructure that helps in optimization of resources, aligns the processes with the business objectives and eliminates time consuming procedures leverages the efficiency of your business operations and delivers productive results.

* Cost

The service model should provide cost-effective solutions and help in extracting maximum revenues without the need for any heavy investments

* Reliability 

The IT infrastructure that delivers high speed services, demonstrates admirable proficiency in information security and disaster recovery and mitigates risks is the best model that will render positive results.

* Consistency

An infrastructure with immense interoperability capabilities provides significant support to your business when adapting to the changes in the environment while maintaining the consistency in the standards.

* Green Technology

The deployment of energy-efficient processes with the establishment of a green datacenter helps in saving on costs and ensuring the release of non toxic elements in the environment.

Automated solutions that provide you with consistent, real-time online monitoring services, enhanced visibility, optimized management and datacenter virtualization processes deliver profitable results.

Other Links

IT support services

Posted by kelton08 at 6:24 AM EDT

Updated: Wednesday, 25 April 2012 6:48 AM EDT

Share This Post

Post Comment | Permalink

Virtualization brings the potential to deliver dramatic savings in terms of server count, footprint, power consumption and cooling requirements for data centers. Data center virtualization encompasses a range of virtualization activities aimed at creating a virtualized computing environment, such as for use in cloud computing, within a data center. Here are some tips to ensure a successful data center virtualization.

Leverage your existing investment

Most enterprises think that the implementation of a virtualization infrastructure will be expensive or very difficult to achieve. A virtualization platform can be simple to put into place. Find out the servers you already have to actually centralize and virtualize in your Data Center, so that server virtualization can be increased.

Consider the cost

Analyze the current and future costs. The biggest cost in many data centers is the power to actually run the data center. By means of virtualization technologies, it is possible to cut your Data Center operating costs reducing the number of servers in operation. You can enable power management features, replace old disk and tape technologies with new equipment that increases capacity and saves power.

Ascertain what can to be virtualized

Although many packaged applications support Virtualization, there are few that don’t. Carefully examine which of your software and hardware platforms are supported and which might require upgrading before rolling out Virtualization.

Plan and prepare for growth

Take care to ensure your Virtualization solution accommodates your long-term capacity and performance needs, as there is always the possibility of your requirements growing over time. Performance requirements are bound to increase along with the increase in capacity. The solution you choose must scale non-disruptively so as not to cause downtime and user disruption and also keep management costs down.

Analyze management plans and instruct staff.

It is important to determine whether your staff has the skills to support Virtualization. Ensure that your consolidation solution accommodates increasing complexity without requiring a larger staff to manage it.

Tackle Security

IT pros must secure virtual machines as they do physical machines and take extra steps to ensure the virtual environment is locked down. "Technology and disciplines for discovery, configuration, change management and more become critical to detecting virtual malware.

A good storage plan is vital

A good virtualization plan is tied to a god storage plan. Backup is highly essential. Virtualization is growing is because it can provide business continuity capabilities. Any Virtualization solution should provide a flexible architecture and the tools needed to help you manage capacity and include load balancing to ensure performance and fast response times and redundancy.

The major benefit in datacenter virtualization is that it has almost direct impact is on the expenses and on wasted processing power and leans towards creating a green datacenter. With datacenter virtualization there is no need for additional physical consolidation and replicated storage of source data. It becomes quicker to build and lower the cost to operate when compared to data-warehouse-only system integration approaches.

Other Links

Managed print services

Posted by kelton08 at 3:18 AM EDT

Share This Post

Post Comment | Permalink

The IT landscape is no longer a quick fix technological patch for rectifying defects. Its foray into the business world has revealed its significance. The business persona has undergone vivid transformations ever since IT has been at the helm. Today IT has to be aligned with your business rather than be a mere technological setup to add values to your business operations and provide powerful support in every aspect. You need tools that help nurture the marriage between IT and your business.

You need IT tools that serve as business service management tools for critical assessment of the tools of your business, the people and processes involved, aligning the business processes and deploying them as service-oriented tools. The process helps in prioritization of IT projects with high business values and provides solutions that help in achieving the business goals. It provides opportunities for optimization of IT data and processes for leveraged business performances. It ensures that the critical applications are restored without any wastage of time.

The adoption of the BSM process helps in enhanced revenues, reduced costs and risks. You can improve the performance of your business with the BSM tools by analyzing the customer experiences and the efficiency of the business processes. The tools help you to manage your complex business transactions easily. It increases visibility and makes you aware of the progress. The BSM tools provide comprehensive and integrated and secure monitoring, analytical and configuration solutions that deliver high quality performances.

The BSM methodology provides proactive insights which helps in averting any unexpected emergencies and huge losses. It has the capability to render large and impressive impacts on your business. It delivers productive infrastructure management processes through efficiently managed network services. Since the business management processes are deployed on the cloud it provides you an opportunity to benefit from the remote infrastructure management facilities. The services are quick and simple to deploy which helps in reducing costs.

Efficient managed security services are imposed that help in managing the risks effectively. The deployment of a proficient identity and access management process ensures that all unauthorized entries are identified and dealt with severity.

The business service management model ensures a high rate of predictability so that your business does not encounter unpleasant experiences and suffer losses. It provides a platform for an integrated and collaborative management of your IT applications. It supports your business with best practices that help in achieving the objectives without any disruptions. The business service management tools provide a conducive platform for an effective collaboration between IT and your business.

Other Links

itil service desk

Outsource IT Support

Posted by kelton08 at 5:19 AM EDT

Share This Post

Post Comment | Permalink

Managing the IT components and assets in your business is always an unnerving concern. You know that you need a completely efficient IT infrastructure for leveraging a smooth operation and delivering handsome results. However, your IT infrastructure barely manages to deliver satisfactory performances causing negative impacts on your business. Weak security policies, network latency, inefficient and ineffective practices contributes to your company’s deteriorating track record and you will not be able to survive in an environment affected by fierce competition.

You will soon meet your end if you do not pay heed to the warnings and apply remedial measures instantly. You need an IT infrastructure that has the capability to accept any changes in the environment without creating any complications or adverse effects. This provides you with an advantage to be in sync with the latest happenings and be the first one to enjoy the benefits. The infrastructure has to be extremely flexible that facilitates system integration and incorporates new applications, compliance frameworks and methodologies easily. It has to provide simple processes for easy deployment and management.

Security breaches have become a major concern and you cannot afford to lose your hard-earned revenues and profits due to an ineffective security policy. The IT infrastructure that you invest in has to provide robust and reliable information security services so that any infiltration attempts or threats can be identified easily and addressed successfully. The IT infrastructure has to possess intelligent identity and access management capabilities for authenticating users and authorizing access to mission critical business processes.

The IT infrastructure has to provide you with services that help in reducing costs and accelerate efficient processes. Datacenter hosting is an expensive process with an insatiable appetite. You need a model that practices lean management and renders cost-saving benefits with elimination of wasteful procedures. Datacenter virtualization is a plausible process that ensures that all processes are deployed on the cloud with the delivery of on-demand services. The services are provided on a highly secure network with high-end and consistent monitoring and reporting facilities. The process also provides you with enhanced visibility and you are granted better control of your business operations.

The data center virtualization strategy deploys energy-efficient processes that fulfill the legal regulations for disposal and recycling of products. This process does not produce any detrimental effects on the environment and helps in reducing costs. You should hire the IT outsourcing professionals to provide you with expert guidance on how to optimize your infrastructure and extract rich benefits. 

Other Links

Green IT

IT security consulting

Posted by kelton08 at 7:42 AM EDT

Share This Post

Post Comment | Permalink

Consultants specializing in information security are trained professionals and works to ensure that their customers have the access to systems and essential data when they need. They also ensure that the security features safeguarding this information is performing up to the mark. A key advantage of information security consulting is that the consultants have profound knowledge and experience, and the perspective on how to secure the customer’s business in the optimum way.

Services Offered by Information Security Consulting

Top IT players who specialize in cloud computing services have forayed into information security consulting. These companies along with their service offerings take the approach of a partner than a mere service provider. This partnering approach allows them to provide their clients with interesting customer insights that are backed up by the competency of their services and further validated by the customer experience. Their service portfolio has been set up in such a way that it helps in offering technical, financial and strategic benefits to the users.

These companies have the capability to cater to the information security requirements across industry segments, with an assurance of quality delivery. Few other services within their service portfolio would include Identity & Access Management, Managed Security Service, Software Help Desk, Transformation & System Integration Service and many others.

Customer Benefits of Information Security Consulting

Let us have a look at some of the customer advantages offered by the service providers of information security consulting. They are as follows:-

* Helps in setting up industry/business vertical aligned Information Security Framework
* Lesser investments on new age technology
* The service providers have the capacity and experience to manage intricate multi-vendor standardized client environments
* They help to bring down the operation expenses and results in hassle free management of the domain experts. This leads to increase in profitability and efficiency
* Has the expertise on Tap, across the breath of information security segment.

Hence, there is no requirement to maintain expensive security SME’s in the role.

Furthermore, companies specializing in information security consulting offer their vast experience through leadership and accessibility to their huge knowledge base. This further helps the customers to consistently enhance the delivery processes.

Other Links

Datacenter Virtualization

Managed network services

Posted by kelton08 at 4:28 AM EDT

Share This Post

Post Comment | Permalink

The IT service desk is an important limb of your business. A centralized and efficient service desk operation helps in saving costs and provides effective control with an integrated and comprehensive business operation. Ideally the IT service desk furnishes a rich and updated knowledgebase of issues that are faced commonly by the users while trying to find resolutions, creating requests, reporting incidents or reviewing the status of the requests that have already been submitted. This helps your business in identifying the relevant issue and applying the right solutions without wasting time.

The IT service desk is a supportive platform that assists in logging, tracking, resolving, and reporting of help desk incidents and service requests. It helps your business to maintain the quality of service provided to your customers by restoring the operations quickly without any severe damaging consequences. It provides notable service request management capabilities from the acceptance of a service request to prioritization, execution and a suitable conclusion.

The service desk operations also include dedicated services such as accelerated responses to the executive users. With a flawless IT service desk you can deliver awesome performances and gain the confidence of your customers. It helps in leveraging your business prospects and provides an impetus to achieve higher goals. Many businesses are inadequate in enforcing an efficient desktop management environment thereby increasing the costs and risks and rendering poor results.

You need to deploy managed desktop services that help in making your desktop environment cohesive, compact and secure. The managed desktop services provide a globally integrated service desk and include services like client application management, client support and asset management. The services are customized to suit the requirements of your business, and therefore yield productive results. An emphatic system integration between the tools, assets, resources and personnel is initiated which helps in developing a robust, flexible and optimized IT environment.

Nowadays you cannot rely on technologies that cannot provide you with precise and strategic solutions. There is no time to waste and you need tools that can deliver powerful and effective impacts. The managed desktop services help your business overcome all the challenges and aid in establishing a highly proficient and reliable IT environment without compromising on quality. It strengthens the nerve center of your business by deploying best practices for a highly responsive and responsible service request management process. A prolific service desk operation rewards your business with promising returns and endless opportunities.

Other Links

IT Outsourcing

Managed desktop services

Posted by kelton08 at 4:28 AM EDT

Share This Post

Post Comment | Permalink

Information in the form of employee details, client details, customer information, transaction details and so on. For small businesses, basic security solutions would be more than enough to protect the sensitive data from going into wrong hands. However, for very large enterprises it would be inadequate to handle the intensity of attacks from both internal and external hackers. Moreover, installation of more security devices and software makes monitoring and supervision an uphill task.

In an IP network, almost every device be it firewalls or servers create records of the traffic it carries, the transactions it makes and the activities it performs. Therefore, to ensure network security each device need to be monitored 24/7. However, this can be quite tiring as monitoring thousands of devices with each device recording thousands of events would be a daunting task. In such a scenario, companies and organizations can ensure information security as well as business continuity by outsourcing security services. Apart from these, it facilitates cost –effectiveness, direct attention to their core competencies, 24/7 service and stay up to date with respect to network security.

Managed Security Services are categorized into six services and they are:

1. On-site Consulting
MSSP provides customized help and support not only in evaluating business risks but also in developing effective security policies and process as per the requirements of the companies. Apart from that, MSSP provides assistance in assessing security architecture and design, integrating security products and managing onsite incident response and forensics.

2. Remote Perimeter Management
MSSP takes care of the installation, upgradation, and configuration changes of VPN, firewall and intrusion detection hardware and software.

3. Product Resale
Certain MSSP provides product resale service, even though it is not a managed service, as a means for generating more revenue. As part of this service, the security provider offers value-added hardware and software for a variety of security-related tasks.

4. Managed Security Monitoring
As the name suggests, this service involves the monitoring and interpretation of the system integration events happening throughout the network. The system events can be malicious attacks, anomalies, unauthorized behavior, and denials of service (DoS). The security provider also performs trend analysis to identify a pattern or trend from the events.

5. Penetration and Vulnerability Testing
In this service, scans and hacking attempts are carried out occasionally. The motive behind such testing is not security assessment but to find out the vulnerabilities within the network.

6. Compliance Monitoring
It involves the process of monitoring event logs in order to find out the changes made to a system that violate any formal security policy. This helps to identify those administrators who grant themselves too much access to the system in order to use the information for corrupt purposes.

Other Links

Network Consulting Services

Identity and access management

Posted by kelton08 at 4:08 AM EST

Share This Post

Post Comment | Permalink

The increase in the dependency levels of the business organizations on the information technology has made organizations ready to face the aggressive competitive markets. However, such increased dependency has moved IT from being a support function to a vital business factor in most industry segments. Further, to maintain their flexibility in IT functions organizations have taken the route of outsourcing most of the functions. The movement from the traditional support structure to the critical component of all business process has made it difficult for organizations to plan out their long-term budget, as one cannot always assess the cost of innovation.

Contemplating the problems arising from such situations, the leaders in the field of IT services have designed methods to fulfil the global sourcing needs of their customers through a process which would benefit both the clients as well as the service provider. Co-sourcing is a business practice wherein the external service provider in collaboration with the members of the client organization performs the service. This process earns an advantage over the outsourcing model in that it minimizes the risks linked with outsourcing, brings in transparency, control and clarity over the process co-sourced.

The Co-sourcing model of IT outsourcing which is based on a partnership between the customer and the service provider, offers the clients the flexibility in choosing the service delivery options ranging from asset light to cloud based services to business ready infrastructure to support SaaS platforms. Further, the co-sourcing partners are also well equipped to provide the clientele with setting up shared or dedicated delivery centers instead of opting for IT infrastructure outsourcing. Co-sourcing model can also include the process of outsourcing part of software development or software maintenance activities to an external organization, while some development in-house.

This would actually give both the organizations a better insight into the process. Based on the fundamental aspects of transparency, flexibility and value addition, the Co-Sourcing model with its striking difference from the traditional IT outsourcing one is today a vital part of the success oriented business strategies. This approach of IT outsourcingprovides a number of benefits to the organizations. With an increased coverage and a decreased overhead cost, this process turns a fixed cost model into a variable cost one. Further, in a highly competitive business environment, this model helps customers provide global solutions with flexibility for capacity management and lesser load on employment liability.

Some of the co-sourcing models adapted by business houses are managed security services, Smart Service Desk Solutions, Virtual Support and Project Management Practice.

Other Links

green datacenter

Posted by kelton08 at 4:18 AM EST

Updated: Thursday, 1 March 2012 4:24 AM EST

Share This Post

Post Comment | Permalink

Information technology is something that is the nucleus of every modern day business set up. Success without it is impossible. At the same time, we have seen that pervasive IT execution has led to unwanted side effects. The awareness of these effects though took time to come in yet has resulted in enterprises to adopt a sustaining practice that is termed as “Green IT” or “IT greens”, that refers to using the IT more efficiently and to minimize the energy consumption.

IT use has been so pervasive that energy efficiency through executing Green IT has become the prime concern for numerous enterprises in their attempt of harnessing helpful environmental practices. Green IT emphasizes on the growing importance of IT and the energy consumed by the data centers globally and other case studies to use IT in a cost efficient manner.

Green IT has numerous aspects. However, green computing and the construction of green datacenters make use of high-end technologies. Some of the goals and strategies are listed below:-

* Reducing the footprints of the buildings
* Making use of low-emission building materials, prints and carpets
* Establishing sustainable landscaping
* Generating waste recycling
* Being able to install the catalytic converters on backup generators
* Making use of alternative energy technologies such as, fuel cells and photovoltaic (PVs)
* Maximizing the efficiency of heat pumps, free-cooling technology and variable speed fans

According to many researchers, IT has been following an indefensible route for a while. Hence, there are huge data centers that exists on electricity, where several computers and computing devices burns up processor power carrying out background works when the working professionals are caught up in meetings. All this results in huge amount of emails and documents printed unnecessarily that is not used.

Well known service providers of Green IT solution providers the users with maximized efficiency in IT Data centers, IT Hardware, and other sections. Datacenter consolidation and Datacenter virtualization are two vital components that help in setting up a Green IT environment. It is predicted that datacenter virtualization will an influencing trend throughout 2012. At the same time, the users that are not equipped for this can resort to datacenter consolidation.

Other Links

identity and access management

managed print services

Posted by kelton08 at 1:57 AM EST

Updated: Friday, 24 February 2012 2:02 AM EST

Share This Post

Post Comment | Permalink

Technology can be best defined as a double edged sword. Along with other benefits, there has been an increase in security breaches for instance Malware infections, cyber hazards, web application threats, Phishing attacks and many others. Today, there are security breaches that involve internal workers such as password mismanagement, disgruntled employees and unapproved access to data. Such security hazards might also lead to legal liabilities, considerable loss of revenue, brand erosion and reduced productivity.

Irrespective, of whether it a small or large scale enterprise internet security concerns resulting from complexities in the system is being experienced by all enterprises today.

Enterprises often select and evaluate a mix of information security services for enhancing and maintaining the entire IT security program and enterprise program. IT security services generally vary from security policy development to detecting intrusion that is provided by a leading service provider or an internal IT team. Enterprises can benefit a lot from the solutions provided by the service provider, though it might be challenging to choose one.

Individuals who are accountable in choosing, managing and executing IT security services for an enterprise should carefully analyze the  options before investing in an IT security service provider.

Factors to Consider While Selecting IT Security Services
There are numerous factors that need to be considered when you are managing, selecting and implementing IT security services. They can be summed up as follows:-

* Service provider qualifications
* Operational requirements
* Capabilities and experience of the service provider
* Viability and trustworthiness of service provider employees
* Service provider’s capability to deliver adequate protection for the organization systems, applications, and information

These above mentioned considerations are applicable in varying degrees to each service based on the kind, size, complexity, criticality and expense of the services being takes and the particular requirements of the enterprises deploying the services.

Most service providers of IT security solutions take on the approach of a partner than a mere service provider. These service providers keep a tab on the customer insights and design their service portfolio to provide financial, strategic and technical advantages to users. This in turn makes an enterprise reach its desired state of competency in IT security.

Therefore, it is essential to select a service provider that can cater to all the IT security requirements across industry segments. It is essential to ascertain that the service provider offers commitment and quality services in Identity & Access Management, Managed Security Services, Transformation & System Integration and many others.

Other Links

Datacenter virtualization

Network consulting services

Posted by kelton08 at 5:03 AM EST

Updated: Thursday, 16 February 2012 5:17 AM EST

Share This Post

Post Comment | Permalink