It Requirements And Industry Challenges
It’s clear that today’s small-to-medium business must do more with fewer resources while still providing exceptional products, services and value to their clients, partners and staff. However, it doesn’t stop there. Regulatory agencies and industry groups are requiring higher levels of accountability than ever before.
"It makes us more efficient than any other solution we tried before."
Associations are now faced with compliance overload. If you’re not snowed under yet, just wait. Every year, American business has to work through yet another truckload of paperwork. The need for up-to-date, well-managed IT infrastructure is an association imperative.
Associations, whether industry trade group or a not-for-profit organization are, of course, service-oriented. You exist to provide your members, constituents and partners with information and other industry-relevant resources. Yet associations often operate on budgets that are lean. Very. More often than not the endowment funds often enjoyed by large charitable organizations are, for most associations, merely a “some day” dream.
These issues, and others, we know well.
High availability. Clearly, you need to have ready access to commercial and custom database applications, minimal IT downtime and data loss, supported by a very fast return to service in the event of any system problem.
Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity. "Fast" just isn't fast enough. Extended downtime is not an option. To ensure against every imaginable disaster, large or small, effective failover systems must be in place. Only in this way will your hardware, applications, and data remain available to everyone who needs these resources, and your operations resume as quickly as possible in the wake of a catastrophic event.
Affordability. Apologies for bringing up a touchy subject, but there’s no getting around it. Controlling IT capital expenditures (hardware, software and support services) is an issue. Reducing operational expenditures -- IT facilities, personnel, maintenance -- is an issue. Having predictable, and fixed, IT costs is an issue. There's a good chance we can help you get over all of your issues.
Productivity. What performance means for the Associations that we serve is an ability to update, and save, database records in real-time.
It also means being able to maintain high transaction throughput during business hours, and keeping systems up and running to ensure that IT resources are available to your staff, or members, whenever they’re needed.
Security. It’s obviously important that your company data, and every transaction between your company and clients is absolutely secure. Secure from those who should not be seeing the information, and secure from actual loss. To this end, you'll need the highest levels of physically security, encryption, password-protection, with ongoing professional oversight.
With External IT, you will benefit from significantly reduced IT capital and operational expenditures and see a demonstrable return on investment.
You’ll only pay for the IT resources used, and leave the configuration management, tuning and upkeep to us. What’s more, you will realize price/performance gains, maximize system uptime and rest easy with the knowledge that business-critical information assets are safe and always available.
Are we as reliable as the sun coming up in the morning? We give it a run for its money.
High Availability. External IT knows that timely, accurate information about members, partners, marketing campaigns and industry events is critical for associations. Nonprofit organizations and Associations need IT that’s every bit as reliable as that empowering a global firm, and that’s exactly what we deliver to our clients.
You’ll have ready access to the same set of applications, communication tools and data, regardless of where you or your staff are working, and regardless of which computer or computing device they’re working with.
If a local failure occurs, you can log into the system from a different computer or different location. All you need is an Internet browser and you’re back in business. You can go right back to the same point in your work process, without any loss of data.
We offer fault tolerant network infrastructure with synchronous mirroring, and continuous data protection for servers with 24 hour rollback.
Anywhere, anytime access is our most fundamental benefit. Whether you’re at headquarters, a remote office, at home or on the road, our clients will attest that we’ll keep you connected. Our facilities boast an uptime of up to five nines (99.999). Less than perfect? Nobody is closer.
Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity. In the event of a Data Center failure, our system can redirect everyone to a pre-determined failover site. It’s business as usual with little to zero downtime. And we incorporate a more flexible and reliable technology than you would have with Hosted Desktop.
Hosted Desktop relies on a network router. Unlike the name might imply, a router alone is not very good at redirecting users to specific resources based on the application they request, their permissions, location and other circumstances. A Portal Desktop, like OS33, occupies the perfect space—between your staff and your servers. This makes it far more adept at handling these challenges.
We take backups, at minimum, once a day, and can have them run at whatever intervals you request including continuous replication.Security. External IT protects clients with data centers and IT infrastructure that are, without question, among the safest in the nation. Twenty-four hour guards are supported by state-of-the-art biometric scanners and card readers. Our facilities themselves are secure against floods, fires, even earthquakes.
The OS33 Portal Desktop platform also makes it very easy for administrators to manage permissions. It’s the only platform with a self-service administration console to remotely manage all IT resources for every user.
The console gives you policy-based application access control to manage users, groups, applications, permissions, profiles, security and folder access rights.
Productivity. The short description of what we deliver is this: we're unmatched. This isn't a mere claim, tucked away in a website. The External IT enterprise-wide virtual workplace is powered by state-of-the-art infrastructure located in our Data Centers, employing the very latest in network equipment and software, application and web servers, and robust internet connectivity.
We can save your company many hours a year, otherwise spent logging in, with our single sign on alone.
Your staff will have seamless access to personalized Web resources, Windows applications and services like Microsoft Office™, Exchange™, SharePoint™, Active Directory™, and SaaS. They can work with your custom business software as well as software-as-a-service applications.
As for even more exclusive capabilities, our exclusive mirroring feature allows multiple users to view and edit the same spreadsheet, document, presentation or file while being in different physical locations. And they can do it in real-time, allowing everyone to work through time-sensitive projects faster than ever before.
They can post announcements, leverage company-wide information assets and communicate seamlessly via email and integrated IM. And, they can do it all anywhere, anytime, on any computer.
If you have an overactive conscience, this competitive advantage might feel unfair. Don't be concerned. In time, most of our clients actually come to enjoy this feeling.
You can add new users, groups and locations in little more time than it takes for us to say "you can add users, groups and locations," and you can access training and support anywhere in the world, without restriction or performance degradation.
The OS33 Portal Desktop also works on an iPad. In a pinch, you can work with a screen as small as that on your smart phone.
Affordability. Today, every business is being seriously challenged to control costs.
When you partner with External IT, you’ll leverage the power, scalability and flexibility of the OS33™ portal solution. What does this mean?
You can seamlessly access software applications, files, emails and collaboration tools—all while reducing, or even eliminating, the need to purchase, operate and maintain servers and storage.
You can mix and match our cloud services offerings to maximize your budget, while meeting your business requirements. And only the OS33 Portal Desktop has a full array of administration tools to greatly reduce your IT department workload for the many routine IT management responsibilities.
Our Managed Hybrid Cloud services allow you to tap into additional IT resources like Amazon EC2™ and Microsoft Azure™, and our continuous replication and standby solutions typically come in at 80% less than traditional disaster recovery.
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While cloud computing has only become a major new IT management tool over the last few years, we’ve been providing these services to companies across the country, and overseas, since 2003.
This means that our team of account managers, technical specialists, and operations staff have already worked with hundreds of clients to cut their costs and give them a tangible competitive, IT edge.
It also means that we understand business processes across numerous industries. When we talk with you, we not only want to address your basic IT requirements, but discuss how we can give you an industry-specific advantage. That’s really the heart of what cloud computing is about.
To discuss how we may be able to help you grow, click a link to the left or visit the heading above, Get Started.
