However, along with benefits, increased integration can bring new risks to your IT environment. The more integrated the environment, the greater the impact failure of any component— software, server, storage, or network device—can have on your business. The negative impact caused by downtime of one device in an integrated environment is amplified as it ripples across your organization. Let’s take a closer look at the opportunities and challenges that come with each of these computing environments.
Opportunities and challenges in a cloud environment
In a cloud environment, systems are highly utilized, simultaneously serving multiple applications in order to increase efficiencies. Failure of a single server, software, storage or network device can cause multiple applications to stop working. And even though a cloud environment supports automated failovers in the event of outages, shifting workloads to other highly utilized devices can degrade performance and negatively impact end users.
Managing and supporting a cloud environment requires time and specialized skills. System failures have to be diagnosed rapidly and effectively and then quickly resolved, or you risk not only reducing IT staff productivity but also impacting LOB end-user productivity.
Opportunities and challenges in an analytics environment
Analytics can help you gain a competitive advantage by enabling you to more quickly and accurately sense, collect, store and analyze the vast amount of data generated by your organization. With insights from analytics, you can make more informed decisions, increase innovation and drive growth.
However, an analytics computing environment often requires complex on-premise data integration and management. Without proper support to address system outages, you may not be able to realize the benefits of analytics. Downtime can delay delivery of critical information—both strategic and tactical—to decision makers, and that may impact business results.
Opportunities and challenges in a mobile computing environment
A mobile computing environment offers a variety of business benefits—from improving employee efficiency and reducing operational costs to supporting faster decision making. But two things are critical to achieving success in such an environment:
- Ensuring data and application availability
- Maintaining the security and integrity of business data
System outages and breaches in your environment can have a negative effect on access, security and network components, which can negatively impact productivity and communication while dramatically increasing risks.
Opportunities and challenges in a social computing environment
Employee collaboration is one of the primary advantages of social computing. However, collaboration increases interdependence, which means that when one group of employees is impacted, the effect cascades to groups they interact with and continues to the next set of related groups and so on.
In a social computing environment, ensuring the uptime and availability of every component—whether it be a web server, application server, storage device, or network—is of utmost importance. System downtime can cause a series of negative effects that ripple across the organization, starting with reduced internal collaboration and ending in poor customer service and loss of reputation.
Beyond basic support
In a highly optimized and integrated environment, it is more important than ever to go beyond basic technical support. Fast and proactive problem resolution requires a single point of contact that can provide comprehensive support across the environment. You need a rapid, virtually seamless integrated technical support strategy to help mitigate risk, reduce outages and optimize business results.
The right support resource can provide a highly flexible and modular set of service capabilities designed to meet the needs of your particular environment—whether it be cloud, analytics, mobile or social.
Benefits include:
- Integrated infrastructure availability management
- Single point of accountability
- Adaptive service levels
- Multivendor support
- Contract and inventory management
- Faster access to Level-2 resources
- Integrated hardware and software support
- Proactive hardware and software support
- System monitoring and automated services
- A dedicated team with a named TSS focal point as an extension of your own team
Schedule a consultation to learn more about how technical support services can make a difference for your business.
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Managed Services
Flagship Solutions Group can deliver efficiencies across hybrid infrastructures with a broad range of capabilities. We offer clients theflexibility to select the degree of support they want for each layer of infrastructure — from basic monitoring and management to long-term arrangements based on an innovation path designed to replace an aging or inflexible infrastructure with new technology.
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