Hiring Managed IT Services on Flat Rates

Various organizations face difficulty in anticipating their monthly information technology costs as a result of fluctuations. These costs might be comparatively low for one month but, they could increase stupendously. There is no correct way to anticipate these costs with accuracy but, nowadays, managed IT service providers help you to do so easily and without any hassles. If you take up their service packages that are available for a flat fee, you won’t have to face any problems related to fluctuating IT requirements. Besides, there won’t be any risks posed to your business. But, these packages are not suitable for every business type.

Suitability of managed IT services for business enterprises

•Flat-rate managed IT service packages are ideal for companies who require steady costs for the purpose of budgeting. The fact is that they are hardly inexpensive as compared to paying a dynamic bill based on your business needs. Therefore, they are not ideal for those companies who want to trim costs. However, consistent billing makes it easy to plan and budget for some others.

•These packages are suitable for those who want to refrain from the liability that comes with escalating costs. When a managed IT service provider charges a flat-fee from his client, he takes up this liability. Indeed, if you adopt this kind of plan, your business enterprise won’t have to pay for those unanticipated high bills.

•Managed IT services that come with a flat-rate are meant for organizations that don’t have any problems with having less amount of control over their IT requirements. While signing a contract with a managed service provider, he holds the responsibility, makes thorough evaluation and strategically implements the plan made for your business.

Indeed, various providers offer services at a flat-fee to their clients but, majority of them do not thoroughly analyze your IT-related needs to ascertain costs.

About Albion Global

Albion Global is an IT solutions company that has been offering a whole range of IT services to its clients for over a decade. These include infrastructure build services, cloud services, IT consulting services, managed services and remote infrastructure management services.

Meet your business goals with IT Consulting Services

These IT services are wide-ranging and comprise testing, system integration, application development as well as management services and solutions. IT services are cost-effective, productive and energy-efficient. Among these IT services, one of the most important service offering relates to IT consulting services. With IT consulting services, your business can easily adapt to the new and advanced system infrastructures and ultra-modern technologies you want to employ for it. IT consulting firms possess specialization in helping businesses attain their business goals cost-effectively and productively.

Indeed, hiring a good IT consulting firm assists you to minimize your IT costs, improve business productivity, bring in centralization for better team coordination and disaster management. Your business becomes robust and safe with these tech-savvy and expert IT consultants. Majority of the IT consulting service providers offer corporate innovation, IT infrastructure planning and design, business transformation consulting, software architecture, system integration, technology migration, applications management, strategic sourcing consulting, enterprise resource management, database development and integration services. They also provide you with wonderful software applications and solutions

 Get more information by visiting :Albion Global

Hiring Managed IT Service Companies is the Best Choice

“Managed cloud” is not only confined to SaaS, IaaS or hybrid cloud services. This might be because cloud services are most often offered by managed IT service companies. These companies have requisite expertise to deliver safe, reliable, effective and custom-fit cloud services. You must avail these services through them, as there are various major reasons behind this.

Reasons to avail cloud services from managed service providers

•More know-how on cloud and other related services: Managed IT service providers have requisite know-how of different IT environments, old infrastructure and inherited applications. They are technologically knowledgeable about mobile solutions, desktop optimization, unified communications and additional solutions that you might wish to integrate with cloud computing services. With this kind of provider, you will probably get a highly reliable and available cloud.

•Scalable and customized solutions: There are various cloud service providers who just offer off-the-shelf contracts and SLAs (service-level-agreements). But this won’t help you to move quickly in your business. You can get maximum out of your cloud only when you are able to leverage on-demand resources and economies of scale with a contract that is customized according to your needs. Best managed IT service providers offer you features like flexible contracts with customizable SLAs and 90-day exit clauses.

•Expert support: You know and better understand that your cloud requires supervision, maintenance, patches, security checks, etc. This is done in the best way by managed IT service companies having well-qualified, certified and experienced security experts and local data centers of their own. Your hired provider offers you multiple solutions. Therefore, you can gain benefits out of their wide range of skill sets whenever required. A bigger managed services’ contract wrapped around the offered cloud computing services is advantageous. You can be benefitted by volume licensing and desktop support.

•Integration: Cloud service providers know the ways of designing and delivering your cloud. If you lack a holistic approach to execute cloud IT services, grave business risks might be posed to your deployment. In case your provider doesn’t bother to know your business and understand its needs, your business might be left with an incorrect cloud delivery model. Therefore, a managed IT service company will be the most ideal for your enterprise and offer you a cloud solution that forms the part and parcel of the overall IT strategy for your business.

Besides, there are various other advantages of utilizing cloud services through a managed IT service provider.

About Albion Global

Albion Global is an IT solutions company that has been offering a whole range of IT services to its clients for over a decade. These include infrastructure build services, cloud services, IT consulting services,IT managed services and remote infrastructure management services.

Hiring IT Consultants is Good for Your Business

The most important thing for every business enterprise is to give boost to the maximum utilization of latest technologies in order to trim down their operational costs and improve overall productivity. In today’s world of digitization, one can witness rapid innovations in software platforms and technologies. With every passing day, there are new technology releases in the market. Therefore, most of the business enterprises find it challenging to adapt themselves with the ever dynamic technology trends. This is where hiring IT consultants becomes significant.

Learning the role of IT consulting companies

IT consulting firms refer to the service providers who have expertise in the field of IT and are experienced enough in tackling various IT projects. They serve both long-term and short-term contracts. Therefore, they can help an organization with project scoping, planning, project management, risk management, supervision and control and change management needs. Their key responsibility is to setup the project efficiently and using minimal cost and efforts. Indeed, companies offering IT consulting services enable companies to obtain desired results.

Benefits of hiring IT consultants

Today, enterprises can get the best out of IT consulting services that offer them loads of benefits. These benefits include:

Your consultant helps your business to learn the weaknesses in the major software processes that have been taken up employing gap analysis. He conducts a detailed study of software methodologies in order to find out the underlying shortcoming.

• IT consulting firms that are well-established might enable you to simplify and improve the key IT processes in your company. This will let you optimize and align your IT infrastructure so as to generate the most-coveted revenues for your business.IT consulting companies remain focused on their chief objective to do away with immature IT processes followed in your organization. They play a vital role in making your business operations productive and effective.
• IT consulting services can be very helpful as they help you detect the right vendor and software program to serve your business interest in the best possible manner. With these services, you can evaluate total cost of ownership in order to assure that you generate highest ROI from the technology or, software platform you have chosen.They also assist you in integrating a new and unique software application into your business model. 
• IT consulting service providers have expertise in carrying out the functionality gap analysis in order to consult you on how to add new features to or, just customize your new software application. Therefore, you can meet your crucial business needs in the best possible manner.

About Albion Global

Albion Global is an IT solutions company that has been offering a whole range of IT services to its clients for over a decade. These include infrastructure build services, cloud services, IT consulting services, managed services and remote infrastructure management services.

Wider Scope for Cloud Services in 2013

Market expectations are high for cloud services in the year 2013. Almost every business, irrespective of its size, is fully optimistic about cloud computing to enable it deliver business value at minimized operating costs. According to a recently conducted Foresights survey, around half of all enterprises in Europe and North America will make investments in cloud services in the current year. Besides, 50% of software development firms will setup applications in the cloud environment.

Cloud predictions for 2013:

•More customer reach

According to a research report generated by 451 Market Monitor, the market for cloud consulting services is expected to reach $16.7B. This even consists of the big and well-established SaaS (software-as-a-service) category. Analyst firm TechMarketView believes that more customers will begin to use SaaS and hosted business process (BPaaS). Cloud computing technologies will need to respond to business expectations in new and unique manner. They must retort with new services, contracting models and partnerships in order to meet greater client expectations. This will help to determine which suppliers and models are expected to succeed or fail.

•Market growth up to $46.8B

As per the Cloud Storage Market- Worldwide Forecasts & Analysis research report, the cloud IT services throughout the global market are likely to grow from $5.6B in 2012 to $46.8B by this year. This report has been published by MarketsandMarkets.

•Federal government infrastructure

As per the U.S. Federal Cloud Computing Market Forecast 2013, cloud services’ market for the Federal Government will get into double-digit growth phase - at approximately 16% CAGR (compound annual growth rate) over 2013-2018 time- period.

•IaaS market growth up to 47.8% through 2015

Gartner, an IT research and advisory firm that is headquartered in Stamford, Connecticut, predicts that the IaaS market will grow up to 47.8% through 2015. According to Gartner, cannibalization and consolidation will take place in the 2013-14 time-period.Therefore, cloud consulting is predicted to grow exceptionally this year. This environment will undergo immense changes over 2013, as most of the companies will move towards it.

About Albion Global

Albion Global is an IT solutions company that has been offering a whole range of IT services to its clients for over a decade. These include infrastructure build services, cloud services, IT consulting services, managed services and remote infrastructure management services.

Hiring the Right IT Consultant for your Business

Businesses need help from IT consultants from time to time. But, most of the people don’t understand why they need this help. Like them, you must also be thinking why you should hire IT consultants and extract the maximum out of them. If you have these kinds of questions bothering your mind, then you must exercise the following precautions before availing their services.

Factors to consider before hiring an IT consultant

You must exercise certain precautions in order to avoid problems with your consulting agency. This is important as your service provider can fully access your IT systems. He knows well what your network does. Thus, you must ensure that he is safe and reliable. Before hiring an IT expert, you are required to execute a comprehensive background check on him.

This is crucial as certain bad things that happened in the past due to the IT consulting company you are planning to choose, risks can be posed to the security of the information lying in your network. Majority of the businesses today also use consultants to conduct these background checks.

You must see whether the consultants offering you IT consulting services are reliable by checking their references. A few of the references might be from poor sources. This implies that the service provider has paid someone to act as a reference for him. Your provider must have enough references so that he can be relied upon easily. This way you can prevent any problems that might cope up.

Contract between business clients and IT consulting companies

It is important on your part to create a contract between you and the IT service provider. Rules must be clear for both parties entering into a contract. They must strictly conform to these rules and do what is expected out of them. This contract gives you the best IT consulting company that enables your business to succeed.Besides, don’t forget to sign a “confidentiality agreement” with your technology service provider. This contract requires that your provider will be held liable if the information they have access to, becomes compromised ever. If you remember all the factors that are mentioned above, then you can easily hire reliable IT consultants who implement your jobs the way you want them to do.

About Albion Global

Albion Global is an IT solutions company that has been offering a whole range of IT services to its clients for over a decade. These include infrastructure build services, cloud services, IT consulting services, managed services and remote infrastructure management services.

Top 3 Major Business Drivers and IT Managed Services

Managed IT service providers ensure that their business clients obtain the IT managed services they need in an economical way and even then get the maximum out of these services. Hiring an IT managed service provider helps you to concentrate on your core business functions, as they are responsible for managing the IT infrastructure of your organization.

Manage your costs with managed IT services

Top major business driver for the end customer is managing cost. Practically, every business must control its spending. It must necessarily manage its IT costs. In this context, managed IT services for business enterprises become really important.  Your IT systems function smoothly and efficiently with a managed IT service provider.

A managed IT services model is considered to be highly efficient due to its remote technology use, economies of scale, efficient expert use and aligned business interests between the IT managed service provider and customer resulting in cost reduction. The best part about these services is that they are cost-effective.

Businesses enterprises employing managed IT services are also advantaged by price predictability. IT managed services for business enterprises offer services to an SLA (Service Level Agreement) at a rate that is fixed and this makes IT services’ costs more predictable.

Service predictability with managed IT service provider

The second major business driver for your business is the service predictability. No doubt, cost should be considered while availing IT managed services but, their quality is of utmost importance. Your business demands secure and reliable IT services that are functional in their nature and fulfill the requirements of the organization.

Managed services offer you a long-term relationship that helps to align the interests of the IT managed service providers with those of their business clients thus, offering better and improved services to the end users. Your provider offers you a hassle-free network in order to cut down your business costs. In addition to this, your IT managed service provider makes resources’ accessibility easier and economical for you.

Chaos management with IT service providers

Last but not least, chaos management drives your business growth. IT managed services enable small businesses to sail through the tough world of upgrades, architecture strategies, technology decisions and so on. Your expert IT provider gives you freedom to focus on your major business operations.

About Albion Global

Albion Global is an IT solutions company that has been offering a whole range of IT services to its clients for over a decade. These include infrastructure build services, cloud services, IT consulting services, managed services and remote infrastructure management services.

Cloud Computing is Much beyond Infrastructure

Most of the people believe that cloud computing is primarily associated with infrastructure (storage, servers, etc.) and its availability as-a-service, though evidences prove that it can be both software and hardware as-a-service. The truth is that it may be anything that is IT and available in the form of a service. In other words, it can be PaaS (platform-as-a-service), IaaS (infrastructure-as-a-service), SaaS (software-as-a-service), DaaS (data-as-a-service), BPaaS (business process as-a-service), security as-a-service, desktop as-a-service or, storage as-a-service.

Cloud services in contrast with traditional IT

Cloud IT services bear the capability of substituting the manual and traditional methods of downloading, installing and configuring development software with a process that is based on an automated work flow and enabled through an unified web portal that offers complete development environments on demand and in the form of a service to software developers. This results in stability and efficiency. These can also integrate architecture deposits, besides the several quality and project management tools and procedures. These tools and processes comprise tracking charts, tools and reporting dashboards through the same unified web portal so as to provide well-rounded development or, test environments as-a-service.

Cloud services offer a compelling option to the traditional ESB (enterprise service bus) and EAI (enterprise application integration) architecture patterns with the help of a “Cloud Integration Gateway” that can even combine on-premises applications with SaaS platforms or applications and SaaS applications to other SaaS applications in the cloud, through a common orchestration layer.

Their other essential features

Cloud IT services provide you newer options on tackling data with ability in order to tap sources of data that help to offer analytic , business intelligence and data warehousing in the form of a service. They also offer low-cost options for high performance computing. They bring in automation to provide improved and better efficiency and cost savings on infrastructure management and application maintenance. These offer innovative alternatives to work together with social networking and micro blogging developed out of a conventional theme of identity, content management and enterprise portals.

Conclusion

Indeed, cloud consulting is the last state when evolving the architecture of a business enterprise. It traverses the many areas of IT architectures. It is successfully taking service orientation of infrastructure and applications to the next level. Therefore, it is much beyond infrastructure and we should realize what all it can offer to maximize business success.

About Albion Global

Albion Global is an IT solutions company that has been offering a whole range of IT services to its clients for over a decade. These include infrastructure build services, cloud services, IT consulting services, managed services and remote infrastructure management services.

Steps To Follow While Hiring an IT Consultant

IT (Information Technology) enables you to store, download and send your data and information through your computer system. Various companies employ IT systems to complete their jobs easily and efficiently. Among the various IT services offered by large numbers of companies these days, IT consulting services can be defined as the services that assist companies in carrying out their routine business operations by utilizing information technology. It is better to hire an IT consulting firm and outsource all your IT-related work to it.

Jobs of IT Consulting Companies

IT consulting companies manage, develop and implement the IT systems needed in your organization. Nowadays, outsourcing IT services has become common among the business enterprises. No doubt, most of the organizations have IT consulting departments of their own but, there are some organizations who find it better to hire IT consulting companies from outside. These organizations can easily focus on their major business operations by following this process of outsourcing. Your IT consultant, like Albion Global possesses high management, communication and technical skills. Besides, it stays up-to-date with the latest technologies available for implementing specific projects of its clients.

Hiring Process of an IT consulting firm

If you want to hire the best IT consulting firm, you should follow certain steps in the process of hiring your IT consultant. These steps consist of:

•First, you need to find out why your organization requires IT consulting services so that you can explain to your consultant what actually you want him to do.

•After you have explained to your consultant about the services your company needs, give other important details that pertain to your company. You are required to ascertain the jobs to be done by your company and the consulting agency. This work might comprise evaluating the website design, profit of the work done, etc.

•Albion Global understands that clients’ role is indispensable in offering IT consulting services. However, it is your agency that shows the probability of success to its clients and how they can achieve it within the stipulated time.

•After all this happens, the client discusses the way in which he will pay to the IT consulting company. In case of small projects, daily pay or pay based on consulting rendered is agreed upon. For larger projects, a fixed sum is decided upon in the beginning itself.

•Towards the end of the project, your agency submits the report. If the client becomes happy and satisfied with the report, he might renew the contract with his agency.

For More Information :

Albion Global brings to you the professional expertise with industry insight based on both national and international best practices.

Know Your IT Consultant the Best Way

Indeed, the field of IT consulting is quite wide. Basically, IT consulting refers to consulting your business clients about how they can be benefitted by their IT systems in order to accomplish their business objectives smoothly and efficiently. People offering you IT consulting services are better known as IT consultants.

Job of your IT consultant

Consultants hailing from the best IT consulting companies understand your business needs and align them with the IT strategies they make and implement. IT consultants manage and engage in several jobs such as estimating, executing, installing, managing and administering the IT systems of their business clients. Since your IT consultant works for you, therefore, you have to outsource their IT consulting services.

Essential qualities of IT consultants

The essential qualities that your IT consultant must have include giving right advice to client, brilliant communication skills, business, management and technical skills. Advisory talent comes from solid and concrete facts deduced from conducting surveys and researches. It is through brilliant communication skills that the consultant can communicate his ideas to the client accurately and with greater precision. In this way, the client will be able to understand him and find IT consulting services suitable for his business. Business skills help IT consultants to crack business deals. Management skills offer solutions to the client within the suggested time frame and budget constraint thus, leaving him completely satisfied. Out of these qualities, technical skills help the consultant gain IT knowledge before he offers IT consulting services to his client.

Rules for IT consulting companies

While hiring an IT consulting company, you must necessarily see if it follows the five fundamental rules discussed below:

•Focus on the relationship it shares with its clients. It should comprehend your business needs and what you want out of your business

•Bear an accurately and clearly defined role to avoid confusion later on

•Visualize success of your IT systems before achieving it in reality

•Offer you the best advice without trying to over-power your IT decisions

•Be result-oriented and ensure maximum client satisfaction

IT consultants have four tier systems including firms offering professional services, staffing firms that provide man power, information security and independent consultants. 

For more information : 

Albion Global offers IT Consulting Services, Cloud Services, IT Managed Services.As consulting services,we deliver advisory services, integrated end-to-end solutions covering all aspects of IT infrastructure

Things to Consider When Availing Cloud Services

The three crucial things that are associated with cloud services include elasticity in use, on demand sales and fully managed services.  On demand sales implies those services that are sold to customers on minute basis or per hour. This way, the customers simply have to pay for the time and amount of resources they have used for availing cloud computing services.

Elastic and fully managed cloud services

It is due to the elastic or flexible nature of cloud consulting services that a user gets the flexibility to opt for desired amount of resources and services at any point in time. Depending on the business requirements of the user, he can use cloud IT services accordingly. Fully managed services offered by your cloud services provider help you to access cloud computing facilities using your PC and an internet connection.

Private/public cloud services

Albion Global offers both private and public cloud services to its consumers on the basis of their needs. Public cloud IT services refers to those services that are sold to the desired customers over the internet. While private cloud services pertain to proprietary network and data center offering cloud hosting services to few selected numbers of people.Virtual private cloud is the new service created by a cloud services provider, like Albion Global and for this, public cloud resources are used. Public or private, irrespective of the kind of cloud, cloud computing services are directed towards offering easily accessible and scalable computing resources and IT services to consumers and clients hence, providing them low cost solutions.

The state of cloud hosting

There are various factors that have significantly contributed to the growth of cloud hosting all over the world. These include significant innovations arising out of virtualization techniques, distributed computing and increased access to faster internet connectivity.Cloud computing services have emerged to be really important and workable for lots of businesses. Therefore, the variety of applications and services will surely keep evolving and make your business come at the top. This will provide a new and unique dimension to cloud hosting and computing across the globe.

For more information :

Albion Global offers both private and public cloud services to its customers on the basis of their requirements.

Save Money with IT Managed Services

Fast growing e-commerce and current economy have given rise to two major issues for the companies. The very first issue relates to seeking ways in which these companies can save their money. The second issue pertains to formulating technologies that help the companies to give their optimum performance. IT managed services are best at addressing these issues.

Economical Managed IT services

Companies understand that they need to invest huge sums of money in their IT departments, if they wish to use high tech technologies in order to run their businesses. This is possible on the part of the bigger enterprises. But, for the SMBs (small and medium-sized businesses), it can be really challenging to maintain high technology standards by using limited resources. Therefore, they find it affordable to hire a managed IT service provider.

Need for IT managed services

Managed IT services have benefitted businesses by helping them to trim IT costs and decreasing their failure while ensuring quality sustainability. IT managed services for business enterprises serve as a bridge between the company and the IT managed service provider and this in turn, proves to be profitable for these enterprises.

Benefits of Managed Services

·         Help you save on costs: Like other managed IT service providers, IT managed services offered by Albion Global help your business in various ways. These providers bring about a free way for the IT resources of your organization, maintain the quality of your business and trim costs. Your IT managed service provider frees your IT staff from their routine IT-related operations. Therefore, they can focus on major business operations and help your business meet its objectives.

·     Regularly monitors your IT department: Albion Global managed IT services regularly monitor the IT department of your organization. This prevents any possibilities of bad situations or failures before they actually occur. Good managed IT service providers manage your business during the course of its scaling up or scaling down. They also offer additional hardware and software support to businesses.

·     Efficiently runs business: A good, reliable, efficient and stable IT managed service provider gets into proper service level agreement with you and serve your business in the best of its interests. He concentrates on your overall business and provides practical and anticipated solution in every situation. He helps you to trim your business costs yet, run it more efficiently.

Reasons behind Hiring Professional IT Consultants

Today, every business utilizes computers and they are managed by IT professionals. It is insensible for your business to have separate IT department. Of course, professional IT consulting companies are more advantageous as compared to internal IT departments. There are various reasons which support the viewpoint that it is better to hire well-qualified and experienced IT consultants than maintaining separate IT departments in organizations. 

Some of the features that make it really important for companies to avail IT consulting services these days are as follows:

Expertise

If you hire a professional IT consulting company, you don’t need to bother yourself with training your IT consultant and thus, make him competent. Business owners who don’t know much about the latest technology and the ongoing trends might face problems in identifying and hiring qualified, skilled and experienced IT professionals on their own.But, this process becomes really easy by hiring one of the best IT consulting companies. They have previous experience of working for other similar companies and can make necessary recruitments on their own. Opting for an IT consulting company that has been constantly offering good IT consulting services is an ideal way to assure that you get IT employees with the requisite expertise and experience.

Objectivity

IT consultants operate outside the usual business confines. Therefore, they have the objectivity and precision in evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of your business. You might think that even your regular employees have the ability to do the SWOT analysis of your business. But, the reality is that they are sometimes so used to the status quo of business operations that they cannot look for solutions to the existing problems. IT consulting services offered by these consultants help you to easily resolve your business problems. 

Simplicity

It is not easy to build an IT department within your organization. But, when you hire an IT consulting company, you gain immediate access to an IT department that is complete in every sense. You can even hire IT consultants on permanent-basis, since they can be highly beneficial for your business. Consultants providing you IT consulting services help you to outsource your workload to IT professionals so that you can simply focus on implementing your major business functions.  

Get More Information : Albion Global