How Can You Future-Proof Your IT Infrastructure

Because the IT industry evolves rapidly with new technology consistently being developed and released, IT systems only have a limited shelf life as top-of-the-line solutions until the “next big thing” is out. Even considering, servers are highly reliable, especially when looked after in an appropriate data center environment, and can last for decades.

However, consider what’s changed in server hardware over the last ten years. Servers are getting faster, storage is expanding, and technology is getting greener. Therefore, careful consideration is needed when buying expensive computer equipment to ensure that your investment is well-timed and beneficial to the business.

Join us to discover if there is another way you can keep your IT systems relevant and future-proofed.

What Are Your Options?

Hardware and software can be costly, often involving a significant outlay of cash to procure the equipment, running costs, hosting expenses, licensing, and annual subscriptions. Therefore, investing in technology that becomes redundant within a few years is not cost-effective.

One possible option is to lease server hardware; all global server manufacturers lease equipment on short or long-term leases. A managed hosting provider also leases servers, racks, or the space you need inside a data center. But another option introduces significant cost savings and will future-proof your investment overnight – outsourcing to a cloud services provider.

A typical, enterprise-ready server will likely cost more than $10,000 for basic hardware. On top of this, you may be looking at high licensing costs if you opt for Microsoft Windows, Red Hat Linux, or any consumer-licensed application such as Microsoft SQL Server or cPanel. With the Cloud, you pay as you go, with costs starting from a few dollars per month.

How Does The Cloud Protect Your Investment?

Future-proofing is not all about reducing costs and protecting your investment; businesses benefit from many advantages when moving to the cloud. Here are some of them:

Security: The security world is a fast-paced, ever-changing environment where threats evolve daily, and new challenges are faced with every strain of ransomware, malware, and viruses. Cybersecurity is hugely vital to modern business, and there is barely a week that goes past when a big named brand becomes the next hacked victim.

When you invest in Cloud technology, you get the primary benefit of security-as-a-service, especially when choosing a provider that architects security and defines service as part of their cloud offerings. Users will no longer need to worry about network security, data encryption, or physical data center security because this is all managed for you.  The user is responsible for maintaining the local security of your servers, such as passwords and patching.

Managed Services: One critical advantage of choosing a cloud service provider like Atlantic.Net is that you can tailor the service to fit your requirements. These options are great for future-proofing your IT infrastructure because you can add these services whenever you need them.

• Managed Networking – Our network architects have designed an intrinsically secure network infrastructure that isolates and protects your service, resulting in an entirely privately managed environment that only you can access. Hardware and Software Firewalls are installed strategically around the perimeter and internal networks. In addition, we offer an optional Web Application Firewall (WAF), a policy-defined device that protects web applications by monitoring and filtering traffic via Network Edge Protection.
• Managed Encryption – With Atlantic.Net, our service is fully encrypted by default and managed by an advanced Key Management System (KMS). All data is encrypted at rest, and in the unlikely event the information is intercepted, it will be wholly unreadable or recoverable without the key.
• Managed Backups and Disaster Recovery – The Atlantic.Net managed backup services are created per your requirements. File Level, VM-level backups, snapshots, and offsite replication services are available. In the event of a disaster scenario, our optional service will manage the hosting platform to failover infrastructure to a secondary location.
• 24x7x365 Support – Our front-line support teams are available 24x7x365 via email and phone, and we always have someone available at the end of a phone line. The support teams are encouraged to develop and grow with advanced training, helping to ensure our customers get the support they want the first time of calling.

If you want to know more about the wide range of managed services available at Atlantic.Net, please visit our website.

Scalability: By providing flexible scalability, cloud-based technologies allow businesses to meet the computing demands of working with large data sets. Whether your workloads involve highly complicated computations or complex run models, or if you simply need a WordPress server, cloud computing delivers the flexibility and elasticity required to match computing power to demand efficiently.

Scalability should be considered early in the design process to negate the need for a complete rebuild further down the line. The easiest way to achieve scalability is to have an application that can live on multiple servers, commonly broken down into the frontend (a web server such as Apache/Nginx), the mid-tier (this is the programming layer), and the backend (typically a database such as MySQL). Then, providing the application is architected similarly, you can scale up your environment as much as you like.

Reliability: Cloud computing is very reliable, especially when compared to the DIY approach, making the Cloud the ideal place for mission-critical applications without having to compromise speed, security, and reliability. It’s ideal for storing large datasets, file transfers, file storage, and online storage.

Choose a Cloud Provider with 100% uptime guarantees. Atlantic.Net offers industry-leading service levels backed by a 100% Uptime SLA. All critical infrastructure components will be available 100% of the time in a month, excluding scheduled maintenance. Our 100% SLA differentiates Atlantic.Net from competitors, and each of our data centers has been designed from the ground up to be fail-safe and highly redundant.

Performance with Guaranteed Resources

Whether you choose a shared or dedicated cloud tenancy, ensure that your cloud provider guarantees system resources 24/7. Host nodes are scaled and load balanced to ensure that no customer suffers from the noisy neighbor syndrome, meaning you always have the resources you need on demand when you want them.

VPS hosting providers invest heavily in computing hardware when building data centers and find a provider with SSD-exclusive storage layers that implement the latest intel CPU architecture, complemented with a network layer that operates at breakneck speed. This performance simply cannot be matched with a DIY model.

How Can You Future-Proof Your It Infrastructure?

These are some of the best ways to choose a cloud service provider to future-proof your IT investment. The cloud offers too many benefits to ignore. Your finance teams will enjoy the change from CAPEX to OPEX expenditure as your costs change to a pay-as-you-go model. The cloud brings many other advantages regarding performance, security, scalability, and adding managed services to your service.

Best of all, your cloud services provider is responsible for the server upkeep cost, including maintenance and technical support, and they also have to bear the cost of hardware upgrades.

Atlantic.Net has been providing cutting-edge hosting services for over 30 years. Are you looking for a leading hosting provider to host your next project? Our infrastructure is audited, and we regularly conduct remediation on our infrastructure services. In addition, our full suite of managed services and always-available professional support team will build the perfect solution for your business or organization.

Atlantic.Net is ready to help you attain fast compliance with various certifications, such as SOC 2 and SOC 3, HIPAA, and HITECH, with 24x7x365 support, monitoring, and world-class data center infrastructure. For faster application deployment, free IT architecture design, and assessment, visit us at www.atlantic.net, call 888-618-DATA (3282), or email us at [email protected].

You can find out more information by contacting our sales team today!