The journey to the cloud begins with the first step – colocation. What if your existing investments in technology prevent you from adopting equivalent cloud-based solutions? Or what if perhaps industry specific regulations prohibit your organization from storing data abroad? The best alternative in this scenario is to minimize risk and maximize device and application up-time by storing your assets in world-class datacenter facilities.

Traditionally, colocation has been inaccessible to SMB’s due to high costs and few commercial datacenter facilities available in the market. That has significantly changed in recent years and with the arrival of the ultimate IT commodity – the cloud – the costs to rent rack space have decreased to new lows; making it affordable to almost any business.

At Compulite we specialize in assisting SMB’s in adopting both colocation and cloud services, depending on where they are in their technology journey. By adding clarity to in-market offerings, we provide affordable options that are easy to integrate. Here’s a short-list of immediate benefits resulting from colocation:

• Reduced up-front CAPEX (capital investments) related to facilities maintenance
• Guaranteed and financially backed up-time (power, networking, etc.)
• Secure facilities backed by biometric readers, video-monitored cabinets
• 24×7 access to infrastructure by authorized technicians and support staff

Traditional CAPEX investment cycles in technology were the guiding principles of any IT budget for decades, and implied upfront investment in equipment, amortization, depreciation and useful life. This is now slowly being replaced by OPEX style, ongoing costs, in the form of subscription fees. These fees usually include all aspects of deploying a new application – from hardware and all the way to user licensing. The simplicity and ease of purchase makes cloud computing an attractive solution to many new and established organizations that are looking for ways to increase their agility and competitive advantage without committing to major upfront investments.

While vendor marketing paraphernalia will often oversimplify the integration process, we adopt a pragmatic, vendor-agnostic approach that benefits our clients first and foremost. Technological alignment with their actual needs, challenges, budgets, existing assets and organizational culture is another guiding principle of ours that we insert in every engagement.

Here’s a few key value-added services we provide to our cloud-enabled clients:

• Cloud vendor evaluation, selection, deployment and relationship management
• Data sovereignty, protection and location enforcement based on industry regulations
• Off-line backup and data retention for long-term storage or audit purposes
• Cross-platform technical support tailored to your organization
• On-line or on-site user support during business hours with fast response time
• Subscription fee management across vendors to avoid service interruption
• Consistent rollout of new features in line with business requirements
• User on-boarding and role-specific training

Legacy web hosting providers have always focused on low-cost services, usually at the expense of security and support services. In addition, the large majority of business owners under-prioritize patching and updating web or content management servers, which leaves them vulnerable to security threats. The exponential increase of websites employing low-cost hosting together with untimely security patching has lead to an ever growing number of online threats involving spam, ransomware and identity theft to name a few.

Our approach to website management is driven by the latest advancements in cloud security paired with technical support from simple content updates, and all the way to malware incident response and clean-up services.

To deliver on our security commitment, we employ and partner with an extremely diverse team of web developers, designers and security specialists that work towards maintaining our clients well protected and constantly evolving our existing processes. Here’s a few services included in our website management offering:

• Daily malware and antivirus scans
• Daily backups and disaster recovery planning
• Denial-of-Service protection
• SSL security certificate for encrypted communication
• Fast SSD hosting storage
• Content management system upgrades
• Security and third-party access control