Streamline critical processes, secure collaboration, and simplify operations. Harnessing cloud and managed services can bring relevance, compliance, and competitive edge to your fingertips, but aligning your strategy and infrastructure with your organization’s key resources and objectives is vital for a smooth transition.

With Blue Equinox as your guide, you’ll understand the importance of tightening your security posture and bolstering your technology stack in the rapidly evolving digital jungle, where risk and innovation abound.

What Are Managed Services?

Managed services are the outsourced responsibility to maintain and optimize your cloud platform or IT infrastructure. This typically includes migration, configuration, optimization, and security. With private, public, and hybrid environment capability, a managed service provider (MSP) will evaluate your users’ data and applications to craft a competitive digital strategy suited to secure and grow your organization.

Whether your dedicated eye in the sky oversees initial adoption or manages continually, your business can focus on creating value for your end-user, giving in-house IT bandwidth to solve urgent items, and freeing your team’s plate to do what they do best.

What Do Managed Services Include?

You can entrust a range of responsibilities to your MSP, who primarily assumes IT staffing as a service, on-demand engineering, round-the-clock help desk support, and hosting and implementation.

How Are Services Enabled?

A good start for your enterprise cloud transition is to evaluate your current infrastructure. With a free IT Audit, an informed solution can be tailored to direct your available resources toward current business objectives.

With Blue Equinox, one of our consultants will get to know you and your company—your applications, users, costs, and technology—and build customized good, better, and best solutions with roadmap implementations. Before you reach for your wallet, you’ll know your critical risks, liabilities, and exposures, and their roadmaps to fortify your tech stack.

Tiered subscription services allow your business the flexibility to maximize your assets and enjoy flat, predictable spending. Fortunately, some providers are like Bill Withers—you can lean on them when you’re not strong and pay on a credit system for services. You’ll receive sufficient support in times of urgency and less when less is needed.

The Advantage of a Blue Equinox Vetted Managed Service Provider

What Are Cloud Services?

Cloud services eliminate your need for internal hardware or infrastructure, so your team can focus on priority tasks key to your short and long-term growth.

Solutions like Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS) or Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) enable your team to access data and programs irrespective of physical hardware or location so they can enjoy collaborative capability, boosted productivity, and the peace of mind of cloud-assurance. While providers vary how they package services, cloud services can be accessed with just a computer, operating system, and an internet connection or virtual private network instance (VPN).

Public vs. Private Cloud

Public Cloud

In a public cloud environment, the provider manages and operates cloud resources like servers and storage and delivers access through the internet. Your hardware, software, and auxiliary infrastructure are shared by other organizations on the provider’s server network, allowing you high reliability at a lower cost.

Private Cloud

In a private cloud model, cloud computing capability is exclusive to one organization. Whether located on-premise in your data center or housed by the provider, your applications and infrastructure are managed on a private network. With the flexibility to comply with specific IT standards and hold tighter grip on sensitive internal data, private cloud is a practical approach for organizations with especially high privacy needs–financial, healthcare, and government institutions, etc.

Hybrid Cloud

A hybrid cloud platform allows your organization more flexible deployment, security, compliance, and performance from your infrastructure. When workload demand fluctuates, hybrid computing allows you to scale on-premise processing to the public cloud to handle overload. Without the need to share data with third-party data centers, you can avoid unnecessary risk and expenditures relying on the accessibility of your resources to handle demand spikes.

Why You Should Implement a Managed Cloud Strategy

Data & Operations Security

Most SMBs cannot afford the redundant and resilient infrastructure required to support 99.99% system uptime without this capability managed or baked into a solution. When you entrust your security to a Blue Equinox Vetted MSP, your critical data is safeguarded in a centralized off-site facility with advanced and multi-layered security.

Complex configurations—especially in hybrid or multi-cloud environments—can always do with setup support to ensure day-to-day operations needn’t slow to propel your business forward.

Optimized Spending

Pay for what grows you, not what slows you. Blue Equinox guides you through varied pricing models so your spending can be predictable and efficient. A heatmap shows you a bird’s eye view of your infrastructure risk and liability. With corresponding good, better, and best roadmap solutions, you have the flexibility to prioritize urgent issues and the transparency to understand your industry relevance and compliance.

Mobility & Flexibility

With more employees adopting hybrid or even fully remote work schedules, the agility of on-the-go accessibility and security of user and application connection is more crucial than ever.

Save the administrative headache and seamlessly add, remove, or manage your users and software applications.

IT Audit Explained

Your technology costs are high, your team is stressed with errors slowing their work, and your systems are a pain to manage—oh, and Jim just clicked a link to claim a FREE iPAD on a company computer. 

Now imagine your IT spending is flat and predictable, your infrastructure and support team are optimized and prepared, respectively, and you know who to call when it all hits the fan.

Our IT audit holds a giant mirror to your pain points and plans the good, better, and best solutions to secure and automate your operations, control your costs, and give peace of mind to your team. We dedicate five phases to know your business, connect you with vetted providers, and guarantee a seamless transition to white glove management so you can focus on your core business competencies and leave IT concerns—including Jim—to us.

Managed IT Services

Managed Onsite Support

Servers

A server is the basic unit of a hosting setup. Dedicated hosting allows your organization’s computers on the network to access services, programs, data, and web pages through software on the server

In a shared server setup (which may host thousands of sites), a hacked or otherwise compromised site could bring yours down with it. Typically less expensive than a dedicated server, and less headache than a shared server, you could reboot individually with a separate server load and operating system, made possible through Virtualization. 

With managed hosting, a provider is responsible for configuration and upkeep. Outsourced software updates, backup solutions, security patches, and more eliminate maintenance hassle and boost your network performance and security.

Devices (Laptops, Computers, Network)

Managed Device as a Service (MDaaS) enables your team to securely access the network and wield the tools they need from a number of devices, anywhere, for a monthly fee.

A managed network is built, managed, and secured by a third-party provider and installed in-house or delivered in the form of cloud infrastructure.

With a managed network, your organization can source the hardware, software, and technical skills needed to operate and maintain an IP-based communication network. From the routers, switches, and servers, to the operating system and firewall program, the provider monitors and secures the network and the data stored on it.

Firewall

A firewall is a fundamental layer of security and often the front line against cyber threats.

Managed firewall shifts the burden of administration, operation, and maintenance of your firewall infrastructure to a third-party provider. Your network traffic is assessed to identify suspicious patterns, and detailed activity reports give your organization visibility to potential threats and security updates to your system. 

When improperly managed, a firewall becomes a security risk itself—it is critical you entrust your security to experts who ensure your compliance doesn’t turn to complacency over time.

Router

With a managed router service, a provider assumes provisioning, configuration, change management, and maintenance.

With your router expenses cut and internal resources freed, your team is enabled with optimal network performance and secure connectivity to safely and seamlessly focus on critical projects.

MDM

With Mobile Device Management, IT admins monitor end-user network devices and update security policies to ensure sensitive enterprise data can be stored, accessed, or migrated as needed. Smartphones, laptops, tablets, and more can connect to and operate within the corporate network safely and flexibly.

Help Desk

A Help Desk is a technical support team in an organization that enables solutions and engages employees or customers through a centralized support platform. Tickets can be linked and monitored to ensure critical issues don’t slip under the radar, and archived to help inform future solutions.

Satisfy your end-users with dedicated support, treat your team to streamlined internal support functions, and create new business value with accelerated growth and scale.

vCIO Services

Expertise, transparency, and support are the key ingredients of a smooth digital transformation. A virtual Chief Information Officer, or dedicated liaison for your digital strategy, will use this recipe to guide your enterprise technology transformation and supervise your IT infrastructure. 

They can advise on your solution integration (an IT roadmap), assess your metrics  for compliance and performance, and above all, ensure your operations hold the competitive edge in the rapidly evolving cloud and digital environment.

vCISO Services

In the cloud-enabled environment, devices outnumber people and cyber threats—and the means to secure and transcend them—adapt constantly. As a result, the vCISO or vCISO services were born out of the organization’s need for expert IT guidance without the expenses and resources required to hire a full-time executive.

With the technical proficiency to prevent, detect, and subdue cyber risks, your digital leader can build security programs aligned with your business objectives to enable your team streamlined and protected productivity.

Compliance as a Service

Compliance as a Service (CaaS) simplifies data storage, privacy, and security for clients and consumers by protecting and updating per industry requirements. Whether housed on-premise or in the cloud, your data is still at risk of cybercriminals and other malware. 

The CaaS framework enables your organization to outsource the roles and expertise required to comply with regulatory law and ensure sound security posture as a result. 

Cybersecurity Insurance

Cybersecurity insurance is a coverage agreement aimed to mitigate functional and financial risks (like data loss, downtime, or network damage) suffered from a number of cyber incidents.

Given perceived high cost, coverage ambiguity, and the bias to think cyber incidents unlikely, many organizations fail to insure—but how helpful is sunscreen on a sunburn?

Cloud / Hybrid Services

Disaster Recovery

When toast falls, it’s almost always butter-side down. Although we hope for the best, IT knows to plan for the worst. Whether your business is externally breached or your equipment simply fails, ongoing data backup off-premise is imperative to avoid potential data loss and interrupted operations. 

Depending on your organization’s setup, some processing functions can be transferred off-site to the remote location to continue where on-site hardware is halted.

Virtual Servers

Servers house your organization’s files and applications. Greater storage needs bring hardware expenses, physical network clutter, and time spent managing individual servers. With virtualization, a hypervisor, or software platform for virtual operating systems, creates separate and private virtual instances. 

With OS limitations and internal hardware components, dedicated servers process at only a fraction of the power of their virtual counterparts and can outgrow your business in size and complexity just to meet your storage needs.

Virtualization can do wonders for your continuity and uptime, but resource consumption, security concerns, software licensing, and high upfront costs are all hurdles of their own to clear in a smooth implementation. Ensure you have experienced IT professionals at your side to realize the ideal web hosting, easier backup & DR, and simple software management that come with virtual servers.

Virtual Desktops

A virtual desktop walks and talks like a physical workstation, but with increased flexibility and improved user experience. Client software the provider installs on the OS allows the flexibility to be accessed from any endpoint device like a smartphone, tablet, or laptop, and the ease of integrated database and storage capability.

Backup Solutions

A backup solution ensures your systems’ data is copied and secure in the event original data is lost or corrupted. Between disaster, ransomware, hardware failure, and simple human error, the risk is too great to not take preemptive measures to minimize or eliminate loss. Just one minute of downtime can cost you thousands—hours could be detrimental to your bottom line, according to Gartner.