Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)
Overview
Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) is an instant computing infrastructure, provisioned and managed over the internet. IaaS quickly scales up and down with demand, letting you pay only for what you use. It helps you avoid the capital expense and complexity of buying and managing your own physical servers and other datacenter infrastructure. Each resource is offered as a separate service component, and you only need to rent a particular one for as long as you need it. In addition to virtual servers, some vendors also offer physical servers as options within their IaaS. This is often needed for applications and databases that are more resource intensive or legacy applications that do not run well on virtual servers.
Is Infrastructure Right for You?
Scalability – All businesses see periods of increased and decreased economic activity. When the demand for your services is high, you need more resource inputs to satisfy the increase; however when the demand is low, your business must scale down to cut expenses wherever possible. Along with increased flexibility in this aspect, migrating to infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) means you don’t need to worry about outdated equipment or hardware lifecycles, as you can scale your infrastructure capacity up or down at a moment’s notice by contacting your migration service provider.
Cost-effectiveness – Cloud computing removes hardware expenses, as hardware is provided by a vendor. There’s no need to buy, install, configure, and maintain servers, databases, or other components of your runtime environment. Moreover, using cloud-based solutions means you pay only for what you use, so if you don’t need extra resources you can simply scale down and not pay for them.
Convenience – Cloud computing also removes the need for real estate in your own building or datacenter. Along with no longer needing to maintain your own equipment, you are also freed from any need to physically move the servers should you relocate offices.
Reliability – When physical infrastructure's malfunction, a business is faced with the potential for severe downtime and tremendous loss. Shifting to infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) eliminates that possibility. This is because contrary to on-premises infrastructure, cloud-based infrastructure or IaaS works on the principle of resource sharing. This means that it works across multiple servers and even multiple data centers. Performance IaaS providers equip their data centers with a high-performance computing infrastructure that guarantees low network latency with high IOPS for your applications. Building your own server environment with similar specifications will typically be more expensive than it’s worth when compared to subscribing to an IaaS service.
Security – IaaS providers have tight security controls in place to protect computing environments from breaches. Along with ensuring a provider has the proper certifications and a proven track record is essential.
Colocation
A colocation center (also spelled co-location, or colo) or "carrier hotel," is a data center facility in which a business can rent space for servers and other computing hardware. Many colocation providers sell to a wide range of customers, ranging from large enterprises to small companies. Typically, a colo provides the building, cooling, power, bandwidth, and physical security while the customer provides servers and storage. Customers retain control over the design and usage of their equipment, but daily management of the data center and facility is overseen by the multi-tenant colocation provider.
Lower Costs – When comparing the costs of a colocation data center with the option of building your own facility, the choice is obvious. Unless your equipment requires a huge amount of room, costs are far lower when using the colocation option.
Fewer Technical Staff – You don’t need to worry about things like running cables, managing power, installing equipment, or any other technical processes. In many cases, the colocation data center will even be able to replace components or perform other tasks as needed. This means you don’t need to employ a large IT staff to handle this work.
Exceptional Reliability – Colocation data centers are typically built with the highest specifications for redundancy. This includes backup power generators, excellent physical security, multiple network connections through several telcos, and much more.
Geographic Location – You can choose the location of your data center so that it is near your users.
Predictable Expenses – The costs associated with a colocation data center will be very predictable. You can often sign contracts that last one or more years, so you can know exactly how to budget your IT needs.
Easy Scalability – When your business is growing, new servers or other equipment can be quickly and easily added to the facility. When your equipment is in a small local data center or server closet it can be much more difficult to expand.
Disaster Recovery and Continuity
Hackers, cyber-terrorists, natural disasters and manmade disasters are no match for the Cloud. Consolidate your hardware infrastructure or become completely hardware independent with a virtual disaster recovery and business
continuity solution.
Desktop as a Service (DaaS)
Hackers, cyber-terrorists, natural disasters and manmade disasters are no match for the Cloud. Consolidate your hardware infrastructure or become completely hardware independent with a virtual disaster recovery and business
continuity solution.
Security as a Service (SECaaS)
Detail your services
Comprehensive security solutions are more than having a firewall in place and a locked front door. The heartbeat of your business is your customer data and financial exposure, and every day we see front page headlines for data breaches, even at Fortune 500 enterprises. Small businesses are attacked daily as well, and often the damages are so devastating that they never recover, both in terms of financial losses and reputation.
Benefits of Security as a Service
Cost Savings
One of the biggest benefits of a Security as a Service model is that it saves a business money. A cloud delivered service is often available in subscription tiers with several upgrade options so a business only pays for what they need, when they need. It also eliminates the need for expertise.
The Latest Security Tools and Updates
When you implement SECaaS, you get to work with the latest security tools and resources. For anti-virus and other security tools to be effective, they must be kept up to date with the latest patches and virus definitions. By deploying SECaaS throughout your organization, these updates are managed for you on every server, PC and mobile device.
Faster Provisioning and Greater Agility
One of the best things about as-a-service solutions is that your users can be given access to these tools immediately. SECaaS solutions can be scaled up or down as required and are provided on demand where and when you need them. That means no more uncertainty when it comes to deployment or updates as everything is managed for you by your SECaaS provider and visible to you through a web-enabled dashboard.
Free Up Resources
When security provisions are managed externally, your IT teams can focus on what is important to your organization. SECaaS frees up resources, gives you total visibility through management dashboards and the confidence that your IT security is being managed competently by a team of outsourced security specialists. You can also choose for your IT teams to take control of security processes if you prefer and manage all policy and system changes through a web interface.
How to Choose a Security as a Service Provider?
Handing over the security of your most critical and sensitive business assets is a massive undertaking. Choosing a SECaaS provider takes careful consideration and evaluation. Here is how Straticom can assist when selecting a provider:
- Availability - Your network must be available 24 hours a day and so should your SECaaS provider. We vet out vendors SLAs to make sure they can provide the uptime your business needs and to know how outages are handled.
- Fast Response Times - Fast response times are just as important as availability. We look for providers that offer guaranteed response times for incidents, queries and system updates.
- Disaster Recovery Planning - A provider should work closely with you to understand the vulnerabilities of your infrastructure and the external threats that are most likely to cause the most damage. From security breaches, vandalism to weather disasters, your provider should ensure your business can recover quickly from these disruptive events.
- Vendor Partnerships - A SECaaS provider is only ever as good as the vendors that have forged partnerships with. We look for providers that work with best in class security solution vendors and who also have the expertise to support these solutions.
Whether it is saving money, improving efficiencies or protecting your infrastructure from the latest security threats, managed services like SECaaS can provide great value to your organization by strengthening your defenses and improving your bottom line.
Containers as a Service (CaaS)
Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS)
Unified Communications is the integration of communication services such as instant messaging (chat), presence, voice, mobility (twinning/mobile app), audio, web & video conferencing, desktop sharing, data sharing/collaboration, call control and speech recognition with non-real-time communication services, such as unified messaging (integrated voicemail, e-mail, SMS and fax). UC is not a single product, but a set of products providing a consistent unified user interface and user experience across multiple devices.
Why Choose Unified Communication?
Better Disaster Recovery – Disaster recovery capabilities are some of the most persuasive reasons to consider UCaaS. Think about the importance of maintaining uninterrupted communications. While large companies can build redundancy into their systems, this can be cost-prohibitive for smaller enterprises, or those with tight budgets. Being cloud based offers UCaaS users access to communications from any location, eliminating the need for redundancy.
Rapid Service Deployment – On-premise solutions can take months and even years to roll out company-wide. Upgrades can take just as long. With UCaaS, a new feature or service can be available to all employees immediately.
Greater Employee Mobility – Cloud-based systems provide access from anywhere, at any time, solving what is often referred to as the “BYOD” (bring your own device) challenge. UCaaS offers connectivity to smartphones, laptops, tablets and other devices.
Improved Team Collaboration – With features like audio and video conferencing, as well as interoperability between devices, employees can connect from any location.
Enhanced Customer Relationship Management (CRM) – Contact center capabilities, interactive voice response, call routing, and other outstanding features will make it easy to build relationships with customers, all while seamlessly integrating these interactions with your CRM software.
Centralized Management – One of the more significant challenges in managing any kind of premise-based application is scaling the administrative functions. This can include setting up new users, applying patches, or updating features. The tasks may need to be repeated many times, depending on the architecture of the on-premises solution. With a hosted UC solution, the administrative tasks are centralized, allowing the administrator to perform tasks once, and be confident that those changes will take place company-wide.
Why Work With Us?
Moving your voice platform to the cloud can be very confusing due to the extremely large number of companies that provide UCaaS solutions today. Unfortunately, they are not all the same and different carriers are better suited to help different types of environments. When you work with us, we can help you pick the right UCaaS solution for your unique needs.
- Assessments – We can help you identify what features you need and your security compliance requirements to choose the correct carriers to bring in.
- Audit Services – We will audit your current communications services and platform solutions to determine if you are using the best and most cost-effective solution for your business.
- Design – We can recommend UC solutions based on current industry trends and best practices, so you can be sure that you are receiving a quality solution.
- Procurement – We are UC supplier agnostic and work with numerous providers. We can offer the best options from multiple suppliers.
- Implementation – In addition to securing the correct UC solution, we can often assist you with implementing new solutions.
- Expense Management – We want to provide you with a great UC solution within your budget and will work to make sure you are investing your money well.
Working with an independent consultant allows us to analyze your needs and source the best solution provider(s) that meet requirements and exceed expectations. This is done agnostically, letting you focus on the project at hand without being tied down by endless supplier discussions.
Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS)
- ACD (Automatic Call Distribution) – Evenly distributes calls
- AI (Artificial Intelligence) – Is the ability of a computer to mimic human cognitive skills, chatbot, etc.
- CRM (Customer Relationship Management) – CRM software that gives agents the 360° customer info they need to solve customer needs as quickly as possible
- CTI (Computer Telephony Integration) – Technology that allows phone and computer to interact (i.e. screen pop)
- Dialer – Platform/Application that automates the process of making predetermine outbound calls
- Gamification – application of elements of game playing (point scoring, competitions, etc.) to encourage engagement and improve agent morale
- ICR (Intelligent Call Routing) – is a term for software routing that attempts to identify the caller and direct them to an appropriate agent
- IVR (Interactive Voice Response) – Prerecorded voice/speech prompts & menus, self-service
- Omni-Channel – Multiple channels to include Chat, Text/SMS, Email, Video
- Reporting & Analytics – Analyze inbound and outbound call metrics to improve conversions, including connection rates, number of contact attempts, processed leads, hold time, call duration, etc
- Web RTC (Real Time Communication) – Technology that allows voice & video communication directly through a web browser (i.e. softphone, etc.)
- WFO (Workforce Optimization) – Suite of tools (WFM, Recordings, Quality Mgt, Analytics, Surveys)
Why Choose Contact Centers?
- Improves the Customer Experience (CX)
- Enhances state of technology like Enhanced IVR, Omni-channel, AI & Social media
- Reduces expenses
- Enables Infrastructure reduction, leading to reduced maintenance charges Provides access to the fullest feature set. Enables multi-channel communication via a single cloud-based platform
- Reduces downtime
Collabororation
Overview
Meeting Services, also known as Collaboration Tools, are the set of tools designed around virtual communication within and outside of an organization. Tools typically include services such as chat/instant messaging, video (with one-on-one or group video meetings), screen sharing, virtual whiteboarding, and audio conferencing. Additional services involve SMS / texting, special services for large group audiences (video broadcasting), and file sharing. These options often vary depending on the provider.
The following key terms help define Meeting Services by introducing the various tools available through its platform.
Audio Conferencing – Audio conferencing is where two or more people in different locations use technology like a conference bridge to hold an audio call. Audio conferencing is different from a traditional phone, in that all participants dial into a central system that connects them instead of directly calling each other.
Chat / Instant Messaging – This is a technology that allows real time text message transmission over the Internet.
File Sharing – File sharing is the practice of sharing or offering access to digital information or resources, including documents, multimedia (audio/video), graphics, computer programs, and images. File Sharing over a Meeting Services platform is the ability to instantly send a file to a remote audience and/or allow a file to be edited in real time by several users.
Meeting Services – This is the set of tools provided as a platform to hold virtual meetings and perform collaboration.
Screen Sharing – The ability to share presentations (such as Powerpoint) or applications remotely to an audience over a collaboration platform.
SMS / Texting – This technology allows real-time text message transmission over cellular networks.
Video Conferencing – Comprises the technologies for the reception and transmission of audio-video signals by users at different locations, for communication between people in real-time. A device with a camera is required, such as a videophone, a computer with a camera, a smartphone or tablet with a camera, etc, capable of simultaneous video and audio for communication between people in real time.
Video Broadcasting – Typically,video broadcasting is the ability to share a video with large audiences remotely. Applications may include training, quarterly stockholder meetings, internal company wide meetings, etc. Meetings are typically unidirectional, meaning the audience does not have the ability for interactive video but may use an alternative platform such as chat to direct feedback or questions back to the main speaker.
Virtual Whiteboarding – This is the ability to use drawing tools (may include templates, text labels, and other features) with a remote audience over a webinar or video platform, allowing you to collaborate on capturing information and drawing out solutions.
Why Choose Meeting Services?
- Provides a platform to hold remote audio, web, and video meetings
- Creates an opportunity to save on cost on travel and field meetings
- Allows for quick organization and facilitation of meetings, moving the project along at a faster pace overall
- Allows for recording and capturing meeting notes
- May be set up instantaneously to meet immediate needs
- Have almost no limit on remote audience size
IT as a Service (ITaaS)
Detail your services
Focus your time and budget on IT strategy by migrating your more tactical IT responsibilities to the Cloud. ITaaS means your helpdesk, security, software updates, mobile device management, monitoring and management can all be managed by trained specialists in the Cloud. ITaaS reduces capex, puts transparency around your financials and ensures predictability around cash flow.