It’s important to understand the role of an IT department in one’s unique business niche. For example, an IT department at a retail store would be in charge of maintaining cash register computers, human resource systems, inventory control systems and a security system.

IT departments for an industrial facility may be responsible for maintaining equipment monitoring systems, collaborating with engineers, maintaining fail-safe computer systems and more. IT departments at a sales organisation may assist with portable laptops, managing customer resource management (CRM) software and other activities that are beneficial for a mobile sales force.

There are a number of ways to determine how efficient an IT department is. One of the best ways is through a set of guided interviews and auditing. Employees at a company should be asked about their experiences with a current IT staff. Questions can include how long it takes for a problem to be resolved, the annual amount of downtime experienced by a department, how IT department staff collaborate with others in a company and other activities where an IT staff member interacts with regular employees.

It’s also good to audit an IT staff on a regular basis. Auditing should look for process inefficiencies, downtime and the amount of time it takes to upgrade software on a computer system. No more than 5 percent of a company’s computers should be down at any time. Any number higher than this may indicate poor performance by an IT department. In addition, all the software on deployed computers should be up to date. Out of date software indicates a lack of attention to detail and a poor deployment strategy. In addition, outdated software on a shared computer network can expose employees to hackers, viruses and other forms of malware. It’s essential to use the newest software available at all times.

An IT department plays a critical role in modern businesses. While it can be difficult to understand the role of IT in some organizations, it’s important to have an auditing process that can determine the efficiency of an IT department’s performance.

1. Lower Costs

By avoiding the costs of hardware, software licenses and in-house support, outsourcing IT is a cost-effective way to expand an existing organisation without purchasing tons of new hardware.

2. Better Support

Unless you have the money to build an extensive in-house IT department, you’ll normally receive much better support from a third-party whose employees are fully dedicated to maintaining the servers and solving customer problems.

3. Saves Time

Day-to-day maintenance tasks such as operating system patching, firmware upgrades, antivirus updates and other time-consuming tasks are handled by the outsourced company. This frees in-house employees for more productive and long-reaching tasks.

4. Increased Mobility

Most outsourcing systems now use cloud computing to offer truly distributed computer systems. This means your employees can access their data and programs from smartphones, home PCs, laptops and basically any other device with an Internet connection.

5. Increased Scalability

By outsourcing your server needs to a virtual server provider, you can quickly scale up your deployments as website traffic changes. Third-party companies are better poised to scale quickly than internal company IT departments that often have competing and conflicting priorities.

6. Redundancy

Not every company has a well-planned backup system. Most outsourcing companies, on the other hand, have daily scheduled backups and redundant disaster recovery systems included in their normal payment plan.

7. Better Security

As much as the idea of outsourcing might seem like a security risk, it often results in much more comprehensive security solutions being put into place. A reliable company keeps your data safe and provides regular updates to firewalls, security programs and also audits their systems. This means you benefit from increased attention to security provided by the third-party.

8. Less In-House Employees

Since many of the daily tasks are now in the hands of the third party, your IT department maybe able to reassign personnel who normally only performed monotonous tasks like imaging computers and installing software.

9. Better Support Systems

Backup emergency power systems, ventilation and cooling are often a low priority concern for growing businesses, until a server fails due to overheating. An off-site, third-party host will be providing this kind of support infrastructure on behalf of all their clients.

10. Use The Latest Technology

Third-party hosting companies have to stay competitive. This means they’ll be utilising the latest and greatest that the tech world has to offer. The benefits in performance and stability trickle down to the customer as well.

As you can see there are lots of great reasons to outsource your IT needs. Smart organisations will look to the future and consider how advances in outsourcing IT infrastructure can bring them long-term success.

Colocation Security

When choosing colocation, you entrust another entity with the physical possession of your equipment. This includes servers, network hardware and storage devices. Your IT department can do all they can with firewalls and intrusion detection systems to protect the data but physical access is secured by the colocation facility.

Since physical security is out of your hands, you must ensure the colocation company maintains the strictest security measures to protect against theft and data loss. Do they have adequate security staff onsite? Do they perform background checks on security, maintenance and support personnel? Is physical access to your equipment guarded not only by people, but by physical countermeasures such as keyed entry and hand scans? All these areas need to be considered when evaluating security.

Colocation Services

Surrendering physical control over hardware means that when a server needs a manual reboot at 4am, you need to be able to contact someone onsite. A colocation provider should be staffed 24 hours a day with knowledgeable, reliable IT support personnel ready and able to help when you need it. Since you may need more than just a button-press, it’s crucial to determine the qualifications of this IT staff as well. Another thing to evaluate is the cost of support calls. Some colocation providers charge very high fees for a simple, 15-minute call while others provide a certain amount of service monthly as part of the contract. This is a key factor when budgeting for colocation services.

Redundancy

One of the greatest reasons to choose colocation is for its outage protection. Colocation providers are more reliable than on-site data centre hosting due to redundancy. It is vital to determine the extent of a prospective provider’s redundant systems. Do they have redundant power? What about the number of generators in case of a multi-day local outage? Do they have multiple redundant data connections so your services will remain online during a connectivity outage? Along with services and security, redundancy is a must when evaluating colocation providers.

With price and space at a premium in both the Docklands and Central London, organisations are now looking for a more cost effective colocation service outside of the main Docklands facilities.   We are proud to announce we have invested in additional data centre space to provide customers with a broader portfolio of geographically diverse data centre colocation solutions and services at a fraction of the price.

Our newest data centre facility, located at the Virtus site in Enfield North London (M25 periphery north), is an ideal location for customers requiring geographically diverse Active-Active or Disaster Recovery dual site colocation solutions .  It is equally desirable, for those companies simply wanting colocation services outside of the Docklands and central London.  The site is serviced by multiple low latency fibre routes and therefore still
allowing data replication back to central London and the Docklands.

We would like to invite you to visit this new, state of the art data centre to see the facilities for yourself.  Please use the contact us form
on the website to make your appointment with one of the team.  If you like what you see we will then extend this offer to a free months colocation when you sign a contract with us before the end of June 2012.

Standard colocation services include:

• Power densities from 1kW to 10kWatts per rack
• Power delivered via dual A&B 16 Amp, 32 Amp commando feeds
• Colocation services from 1U to multiple racks
• Intelligent PDU’s providing power, temperature & humidity monitoring
• 24×7 physical access
• 24×7 security
• 24×7 support helpdesk
• 24×7 Remote Hands capabilities
• Minimum Tier 3 resilience with N+1 and 2N UPS options
• Carrier Neutrality
• Connectivity options including;
• Dark Fibre, Wavelengths, MPLS, VPLS, Ethernet & IP bandwidth

Further expansion is planned for Q2 2012 at the Digital Realty Trust data centre located in Redhill Surrey (M25 periphery south).