Running Your Servers in the Cloud: If You Are not Doing It, Read This!

By the DynaSis Team

For close to a decade, providers and the media have touted cloud servers, also known as Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), which can also provide IT support, as a way for business owners to end the expensive, disruptive cycle of break and fix. Small and midsized business (SMB) owners in particular often struggle with outdated IT equipment until replacement becomes inevitable—and often inconvenient.

With IaaS, SMBs lease space at another provider’s data center, which hosts, manages and maintains—in a secure cloud environment—the data and applications previously kept on company servers. As many advocates have noted, this approach not only ensures much greater reliability and availability but also lets organizations treat the cost as an operating expense for tax purposes.

While this value is still very real, in the past few years, other tangible benefits of IaaS have made the solution even more relevant for SMBs. We’ll outline a few of them here.

• Dynamic load balancing: In a data center, a group of servers can be intelligently and automatically managed so that when one experiences a sudden load (usage) surge, others can assume part of the burden to keep data flowing at the highest speed possible. By balancing loads in this manner, server response can remain optimized, in turn supporting maximum productivity. Such an approach is impossible with a single in-house server, and it requires complex management with even a few.
• Faster, secure order processing: For SMBs that sell products online, or exchange secure information for any reason, the demands of encryption can bog down their servers. The most secure, advanced versions of SSL (secure sockets layer; a common Internet security protocol) generate massive amounts of data, all of which must be processed through the server handling the exchange. With IaaS on shared servers, this load can also be managed more efficiently, keeping data flowing quickly and securely.
• Scalability and flexibility:Better IaaS providers have advanced, powerful storage, servers and networking technologies, enabling them to scale an organization’s server allocations up or down at a moment’s notice—or even on demand, depending on the service agreement. For firms that work on large projects with massive amounts of data—especially those that occur only periodically—this capability is a significant benefit that also helps control costs.
• High availability with support for business continuity and disaster recovery (BC/DR):One of the greatest benefits of IaaS is its support for BC/DR. Information hosted at an offsite data center is inherently safe from a physical disaster at the organization’s location. And, since data exchange with IaaS uses a remote delivery model, data and applications can be accessed by employees from any device. This approach ensures continuity for files, email messages and services, web servers and critical applications with no loss or disruption of data.

These features, along with network protection from cybercrime, only scratch the surface of the benefits of IaaS and managed IT services. We will talk about more at a future data. One thing to remember, between now and then, is that IaaS also spurs business innovation and growth. It is a proven fact that when business leaders and IT professionals aren’t being sidetracked by day-to-day technology problems, they have more time to focus on ingenuity and inspiration. The end result can be an amazing boost in corporate achievement.

For small to midsized business owners and executives who are concerned about managed IT support services and network threat protection, DynaSis is one company that has been at the forefront since 1992. In this ever evolving world of cybercrime, crypto virus and network access protection have become critical to every company’s security. DynaSis also provides 24 x 7 x 365 outsourced IT services, with its own trained staff for helpdesk, real-time monitoring and the DynaSis Business Cloud, for highly secure data storage and backup. You can find out more by calling us at 678.218.1769, or checking out our website at www.DynaSis.com.