IT Services Placerville

What you need to know about IT services in Placerville

IT is now a mainstream commodity like electricity and water and, as with electricity and water, many companies just want it to work, without them actually having to do anything. They are quite happy to pay for it, but they don’t want to have to deal with it. Fortunately, there is a wide range of IT services in Placerville which can take care of everything for you, often in a very cost-effective manner. Here’s what you need to know about the main ones.

Colocation and managed hosting

Colocation is when you rent an external site for some or all of your IT infrastructure, particularly your servers. The colocation partner takes care of power and internet (including making sure that there are back-ups for both services) plus physical security. Everything else is the responsibility of the client.

Managed hosting is a subset of the managed IT services sector. With managed services, you lease infrastructure from a managed hosting partner and they take care of everything up to (and usually including) the operating system on a server. All the client has to do is manage their applications and data.

IT support

The term “IT support” used to be a catch-all for any sort of maintenance or repair work. These days, however, it has become much more specific. It now relates to any ad hoc support for specific needs. IT support can be delivered proactively (e.g. project implementations) or reactively (traditional break/fix work) but in either case, it is focused on deliverables whereas managed IT services is about everyday care and maintenance. In fact, you could say that IT support is about solving problems whereas managed IT services is about avoiding them.

If you’re using IT support for project work, then you can and should work out requirements in advance and hence be able to budget for them. In this situation, you may find that the most cost-effective approach is to buy bundles of hours or credits for you to use as you wish. Be aware, however, that these tend to be time-limited and sold on a “use-them-or-lose-them” basis.

If you’re planning on using IT support to deal with anything which is outside the scope of your managed IT services plan, then you may want to look at using a combination of sinking funds and insurance, especially if you may need help with an urgent fix, such as remedying a cybersecurity issue (possibly during a live attack).

Managed IT services

Managed IT service providers are basically the people who take care of regular care-and-maintenance tasks, so their customers can just forget about them. They don’t have to recruit and retain (and manage) IT staff. They don’t have to create rotas and schedules and work-logs. They just have to pay a fixed monthly fee.

Some SMBs use managed IT services to lighten the workload of an in-house IT maintenance team or to compensate for the lack of in-house knowledge in certain areas (particularly IT security). It is, however, becoming increasingly common for SMBs to use managed IT services to take care of all regular tasks in preference to employing in-house staff for basic maintenance. These days, any IT staff who are employed directly by an SMB are likely to be involved in “value-add” tasks such as development.

As managed IT services is now such a huge industry, managed IT services providers have started to move into different parts of it. There are still many, excellent, generalists, who provide all (or at least most) of the services needed (or just wanted) by the average SMB. There is also an increasing number of specialists, who focus on one particular area of managed IT services, especially managed IT security. Some may even focus on a particular subniche of it, such as managed endpoint security.

Working with different specialist companies may be a solid option for companies at the larger end of the SMB scale. For most SMBs, however, it probably makes the most sense to keep your life simple by looking for a managed IT services partner in Placerville who can provide all of the services you need and want.

In fact, ideally, you might want to look for a managed IT services partner in Placerville who can also offer IT support, which many of them do. IT will be managed and billed separately to your main managed IT services contract, but it will keep everything together. This can be a major benefit from the point of view of streamlining your IT processes and it may even enable you to negotiate a more attractive price or some other benefit for being a more valuable customer.

If you want to speak to a reputable and experienced IT services provider in Placerville, please click here now to contact Aperio.IT.

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