One of the fundamental benefits of moving key IT systems to the cloud is getting out of the hardware management business. Some businesses see enormous value in a pivot away from long-term investments in infrastructure, a move that offers both strategic and financial flexibility.
But what about businesses that are still receiving tremendous value from their investments in on-premise hardware? Or organizations that face regulatory- or security-based requirements to keep critical servers onsite?
In this article, we explain how managed services can help provide a “cloud-like” experience for on-premise hardware–and how this approach can bring some of the cloud’s most critical strategic benefits to businesses’ existing servers.
What are the key functional benefits of cloud-based infrastructure?
To be clear, transitioning business critical infrastructure to the cloud is the right choice for many organizations. It allows the business to streamline IT administration workflows, dramatically reducing the risk, time demands, and worries associated with managing OS upgrades, patches, power, and more. For businesses with unpredictable future workloads or acquisition plans, the cloud offers seamless scalability alongside cost certainty in the form of a simple monthly service fee. Of course, these inherent, foundational benefits of the cloud simply cannot be matched by on-premise infrastructure.
But for many businesses, moving away from their on-premise hardware simply doesn’t make sense. For these organizations, it’s important to recognize that there are many other benefits offered by the cloud–and viable avenues for achieving them with the right mix of managed services for on-premise systems.
Which cloud benefits can be delivered via managed services for on-premise hardware?
A managed service provider with the right mix of capabilities can help on-premise hardware deliver a highly streamlined, cloud-like experience for business users and management alike.
For example:
- Simplified management. A managed services partner can handle updates, security patches, OS upgrades, and more, keeping your system up-to-date while freeing up internal IT resources for value-added projects.
- Planning to scale. While on-premise hardware cannot scale up on a moment’s notice like cloud-based infrastructure, proactive planning is sufficient to ensure that most businesses will not encounter storage or compute restraints. A managed service provider should work with you to understand future business plans and IT strategy and determine the requisite hardware needs.
- Resourcing and staff augmentation. From security to infrastructure management, best practices for maintaining on-premise hardware require a wide variety of specialized skill sets. A managed service provider with all of the right expertise on staff can dramatically reduce the challenges (and costs) that come with hiring and retaining a variety of on-staff experts. We take a deeper look at the value of staff augmentation in our article here.
- Performance and reliability monitoring. Major data centers offer a level of redundancy, backup power, and other capabilities that is virtually impossible to cost-effectively match at the scale of most organization’s on-premise server(s). However, a dedicated, proactive, 24/7 performance and reliability monitoring capability can help substantially boost resilience and peace of mind for on-premise systems. Learn more in our article on remote monitoring for IT managed services.
- Disaster recovery and high availability. The most effective managed service providers should offer options for disaster recovery and business continuity in the case of a disruption to your on-premise systems. Real-time, automated fail-over recovery can allow the business to continue with minimal interruption of the business while a high availability setup (when necessary) can even replicate your database minute-to-minute to ensure that no valuable data is lost. When managed by a trusted service provider, these capabilities can provide cloud-like resilience for an on-premise data center.
While an on-premise data center will always require investing in hardware and robust power management infrastructure, the capabilities outlined above can provide much of the hassle-free, resilient operation that is so valued in cloud implementations.
The key to achieving a “cloud-like” experience for your on-premise systems? A multi-faceted service provider who can take on the full range of tasks required to keep your system up-to-date, safe, and performing its best. Most importantly, the right MSP should offer a true long-term strategic partnership focused on keeping key IT infrastructure ready to fulfill all of the business’s current and future requirements.
We take a deeper look at the benefits of working with a multi-faceted managed service provider in our article here.
Find the Right Strategy for Your Organization: On-Premise vs. Cloud Infrastructure
There are more alternatives than ever for bringing IBM i to the cloud, and PSGi has experience helping many different organizations adopt cloud-based strategies like PaaS.
At the same time, we work with many other organizations where on-premise hardware is continuing to provide exceptional value and is expected to do so for many years to come. Ultimately, the right path forward will depend on each organization’s unique combination of current and future business needs, IT resources, budget, existing investments, and many other factors.
If you need help identifying the right strategy for your business-critical infrastructure, PSGi is here to help –please don’t hesitate to reach out to our team with your questions.
