Moving your business over to a Hosted Network.

Slash those IT costs and use a Hosted service.

I had to delve into the world of IT Support recently, which is not my favorite of tasks. I run an e-commerce company and we have expanded so I was put in charge of sorting out the “IT Infrastructure”, great, thanks for that.

So where do you start? Google is always the first place to go I guess so I started there searching for IT Support companies that maybe could help setup our new network and all of our new hardware, the idea scenario would be to find someone that will buy the hardware for you, install it, configure it and generally take care of everything for you (no doubt at a premium rate, I am sure)

Yes, there are plenty of these companies out there at the moment and YES, they do charge a premium!! I thought a realistic cost for 10 users requiring workstations and obviously new servers would be around the 3-4k mark. However, to date, we have received about 12 quotes with each one no less than £7000.00 and this is too much money for a small business like ours.

So what are the alternatives? Hire purchase is indeed one possibility and a lot of IT firms are quite happy to offer these terms, however I am not keen on this as IT procurement seems to lose value quicker than a Citroën car (and that’s saying something).

I was thinking to myself that we wouldn’t have any choice in the matter, and then someone suggested an alternative.

“What about a hosted service?” someone suggested. My first thoughts were “what the hell is that?” so the conversation deepened and eventually I hit Google again to do some research.

After a couple of hours reading I realized that a hosted network was the answer to my prayers, and in so many ways. No doubt that some readers of this hub will already know what a hosted solution is but for those that do not, here is a rough idea.

You do not have any servers at your office, all you need are basic computers that have internet access. We bought 10 machines known as “thin clients” and these were as cheap as chips. Basically, all of your work is hosted on external servers that form part of a “cloud network”. You access your email, applications and network drives all from a “virtual desktop” that you access from your workstations.

Even better, you can work from anywhere in the world!! All you need is a machine that has an internet connection and you can access your desktop from ANY machine. From a cost point of view, it suits our budget down to the ground, we pay a “per user” cost and from what I can gather every company offering this service works the same way. Another great feature is that we only need to install and pay for software as and when we need it. If we stop using an application then we simply uninstall it and stop paying for it, perfect.

Conclusions.

I have to say that so far I have been mighty impressed with this way of working. Not only has it saved us a fortune in upfront costs for hardware and software, but it has also turned out to be more productive as all of our staff can access their work from anywhere which is perfect for us as we are all obsessed with our work.

Now all I need to do is find a hosted “picking and packing” solution so I can secure that January payrise!!

Resources.

IT Support London company that provided us with the service. We would never go back to our old way of working.

Cloud computing guide for those who don’t know too much about it.