Top Best IT Services West Sacramento

What you need to know about IT services in West Sacramento?

These days there are all kinds of different IT services in West Sacramento you can use to make your business run more smoothly. For the most part, they can be roughly divided into colocation services, IT support, and managed IT services (of many different sorts). Here is a quick guide to what they are and what they mean.

→ Colocation

Colocation isn’t as popular as it used to be, but, like most IT services it has a place and is useful for some businesses. With colocation, you buy your own IT hardware and have it installed at a location belonging to a third-party vendor. They then take care of infrastructure (power and internet) and security, while your in-house IT team (or other vendors) take care of managing the hardware.

The need for continuity of service is probably the main driver behind colocation, possibly followed by the practicalities of literally finding a place to put servers, which need very specific conditions, including plenty of cooling.

In short, colocation can be a sensible and effective solution if you’re happy to stick with the “old-school” system of buying all your own IT equipment and just need somewhere safe to house it, but it does involve a lot of upfront expenses and the management and cybersecurity of your servers are all on you.

→ IT support

IT support used to be the catch-all term for anything to do with IT. These days, however, it refers specifically to services provided on an ad hoc basis to deal with specific, short-term needs. Although IT support providers certainly continue to deal with the traditional break/fix work which was once their bread and butter, there is now much more of an emphasis on project implementation. That said, IT support providers often work in tandem with managed IT services providers, essentially filling in where managed IT services leave off.

→ Managed IT services

Even though managed IT services is now a huge industry, used by many companies of all sizes, especially SMBs, it’s not necessarily well understood, so here is what you need to know.

The whole managed services industry revolves around the principle of providing predictable services for a fixed fee. In other words, it’s essentially a care-and-maintenance industry. As with other areas of life, a regular, effective care-and-maintenance schedule often goes a very long way to preventing problems from arising in the first place. It cannot, however, guarantee that they will be completely eliminated and if they do arise, it is the client’s job to fix them (or to arrange for them to be fixed).

This means that anyone intending to use managed IT services needs to have a plan in place to deal with break/fix situations. In practical terms, this means that either you need an in-house IT team with the capability to remedy them or you need an IT support partner and suitable budget/insurance to pay for any work which needs to be done. These days the latter is far more common as it is both convenient and cost-effective.

For the sake of completeness, many managed IT service providers can also offer IT support as an additional service. This can be the most convenient solution of all as it puts one company in charge of all your IT needs. You will, however, need to keep tabs on what is being provided as part of managed IT services and what is being billed as an extra service by their IT support team.

→ The niches and sub-niches of managed IT services

Managed IT services is now such a huge industry that it has niches and even subniches. To make matters even more confusing, the same managed IT services provider may cover a variety of niches, potentially including their subniches or they may specialize. If they do cover multiple niches, they may offer some managed IT services packages which cover a variety of niches and others that are only for one.

At present, the biggest niches of managed IT services are managed to host and managed IT security. Managed hosting is when a client leases infrastructure from a managed IT services vendor and the vendor takes care of maintaining everything from the hardware and infrastructure right up to the operating system on the servers. In other words, the client only has to manage their own data and storage.

Managed hosting is often used when clients want to have their own private cloud but don’t want the hassle of running it completely in-house. For completeness, public clouds are essentially a sub-niche of managed hosting services.

Managed IT security is exactly what the name suggests and can be a very effective way for SMBs to get the security they need without having to recruit and retain skilled cybersecurity professionals for whom is currently a global shortage.

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

IT Services Sacramento