Managed Hosting
What is Managed Hosting
Managed Hosting is a service where your company owned software (Prolog® and others) is hosted in a state-of-the-art data center operated by Project Team Solutions, Inc. (PTSI). You are charged a flat monthly fee to keep your software operating smoothly and you are guaranteed high reliability and access. All necessary services and hardware are provided by PTSI. Because you still own your software and pay for just the hosting service you are able to achieve significant financial benefits.
Why Managed Hosting
When companies decide to deploy a particular software solution or other technology for a project they must also assess the impact that technology will have on their internal infrastructure and personnel. Many times internal IT resources are already stretched thin and their primary focus is on general business applications for the enterprise. Requirements for project management systems typically include collaboration by outside team members and field employees. In many cases corporate IT managers are not comfortable with external stakeholders accessing their internal corporate network. These issues coupled with the massive storage requirements for project related documents (CAD files, specifications, high volume of records) can make it difficult for the applications to be run in house. Project Team Solutions, Inc. combines the technical expertise, the hardware infrastructure and the experience to host your project management and project management applications securely, efficiently and economically.
What is provided?
- 24/7 Service Level Agreement (99.99% up-time guarantee)
- System Administration
- Remote connectivity
- Application Administration
- Data Center connectivity on the internet backbone
- Unmatched data security
- High bandwidth
- Large storage allocation per user included
Your Advantage:
- Cost reduction/lower cost of ownership
- Cost avoidance
- Allows focus on core business
- Rapid deployment
- Unlimited secured accessibility
- Scalable disk space
Benefit
The primary benefit to engaging in a managed hosting strategy is that the overall cost of ownership and operation of an application environment is reduced by several orders of magnitude. From a budgeting standpoint the consistency of a monthly fee is apparent when creating the annual budget. Among other benefits, application and system administration are included as part of the managed hosting service. PTSI administrators conduct testing, application upgrades and service pack installation. These maintenance tasks occur seamlessly behind the scene for the user community, at the appropriate times based on the customer’s operational requirements.
An application utilizing web-based technology allows all authorized user’s access from any location where connectivity to the Internet is available. This allows field staff and headquarters management to collaborate using the same application platform without concern for geography. In addition, there are the physical environment benefits that increase the reliability of the service but are not visible to customers. Falling into this category:
Infrastructure - Reliability of the infrastructure to provide adequate cooling, power and fire protection
Equipment - Data center quality servers, storage, switches, routers, and connections
Security - Physical facility security, access, and network security
Redundancy - In servers, storage capacity, connectivity, power, and cooling
Monitoring - Network monitoring of multiple connectivity paths and proactive server monitoring
Bandwidth - The ability to scale available bandwidth as usage dictates
Connectivity - Multiple physical connections to multiple internet service providers
Capacity - The ability to scale the infrastructure as required serving additional users
Business Case
Many costs are incurred in the deployment of an application. Not all of these costs are financial; the non financial costs may ultimately be the most important because they result in impacts that are not always easy to identify.
Financial expenditures are simple to identify and easy to aggregate. In this group fall the cost of hardware, software, and IT administration. Although application administration is a crucial component, its real price is usually not fully accounted for in the cost equation; the effect (additional cost) may manifest itself as reduced service in other areas as resources are extended to provide the initial planning, setup and related services. For most business entities hosting and administering applications is not strategic to their IT department’s mission.
