What Customers Should Look For When Considering Value Added Services
Authored by Volker Rath, Hosting Subject Matter Expert
Volker Rath, subject matter expert
Customers often pay attention to their core requirements when choosing an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) provider. They want to learn everything about the network, compute resources, price, compliance requirements, and service level guarantees. Unfortunately, value added services are quite often an afterthought.
If a customer is not paying attention to the value-added services that are offered, they will probably run into issues later after they have migrated all their workloads to the new environment. Even though value-added services may be considered to be additional perks, they are required for the IT environment to run smoothly. These services are, in actuality, important aspects of supporting core infrastructure.
Some examples of key value-added services are backup, additional storage, archive storage, patch management, firewalls, and intrusion detection. Additionally, how can these services be combined with hybrid environments? For example, storage is a core offering of cloud computing, but if the environment is situated in a colocation rack, the customer is responsible for all storage requirements. A value added service from an IaaS provider could also offer backup or storage for colocation providers. These services provide additional value above and beyond the traditional requirements and workloads of customers.
This is why customers should always compare providers’ core offerings and value added services. It takes away much of the responsibility from customers so they can spend 100 percent of their focus on their own business and applications. These services would otherwise be very labour intensive to monitor and configure.
Take backups for example—they require agents that run on different kinds of operating systems to be centrally managed, configured and properly set up. A backup environment also needs to be attached to large amounts of storage in order to retain all the backup files from every single connected machine. This is a very costly and time-consuming task to perform.
Value added services allow customers to buy very costly, mature, and professional environments on a per-use basis. This ends up heavily reducing the costs for each individual customer.
To learn more about how value added services can allow your organisation to completely focus on your own business and applications, or for general questions, contact Macquarie Telecom by submitting an online enquiry.