What makes a good enterprise hosting partner?

The fast moving global business environment and competitive pressures have increased dependence on IT to create differentiated value at lower cost structures. This has created a massive demand for reliable enterprise hosting solutions that deliver high-availability, enterprise class infrastructure, without requiring companies to spend too much time, efforts, or costs.

Enterprise hosting, as the name suggests, refers to a broad umbrella of hosting services for enterprises looking for high-availability, high-performance, flexible solutions for their business-critical applications and the underlying infrastructure. However, it is important to reach out to the right enterprise hosting provider to reap the full business benefits.

Selecting a good enterprise hosting provider requires multiple considerations. Here are a few key aspects to consider while selecting your enterprise hosting provider:

• Core enterprise hosting expertise: The enterprise hosting provider should have a track record of completing multiple implementations and hosting projects in the past for various organizations and across industries. This will indicate that your provider understands all the IT challenges faced by enterprises and has the required experience and capabilities to deliver reliable enterprise hosting services.
• Best in class infrastructure: Check that your enterprise hosting provider has cutting-edge infrastructure in place to be able to alleviate all your hosting worries. The enterprise hosting providers that have multiple enterprise class Data Centers equipped with the latest tools and technologies for hosting, monitoring, reporting, security, and technical support, are surely a good bet. Also, see if the provider offers dynamic platforms like cloud computing, virtualization, etc., to help you leverage technology in the most efficient and cost-effective manner.
• Reliable, Customizable Offerings: Find out if your enterprise hosting offering includes features such as back up of remote data, disaster recovery, 24x7 technical help desk services, and security monitoring to ensure that your IT systems and data are safe. Also, to achieve maximum value from hosted IT environment, go for a provider who customizes offerings based on your business needs, and not vice versa.
• Transparency in hosting environment: It is important that you have complete transparency and control over the hosting environment. Look for enterprise hosting providers that offer web-based monitoring and reporting tools. These tools offer a single point that gives a near real-time insight into the performance and availability of the hosted infrastructure, and also log and track all service requests and faults. This gives the organizations complete control over their hosted systems, even though they are operating out of the provider’s data center – ensuring complete peace of mind.
• Cost efficiency: The primary reason for outsourcing the IT environment to an enterprise hosting provider is to reduce the upfront and unexpected capital costs, and get a predictable operation cost. A good enterprise hosting provider not only meet these needs, but also suggests ways to increase the return on IT investment by using newer, cost-effective technologies such as virtualization, load balancing cloud computing, etc.
• Robust Service Level Agreements: SLAs are a key part of any hosting contract, and can actually save money for the customers. Ensure that the enterprise hosting provider offers guaranteed SLAs for availability, performance, and problem resolution in alignment with your needs, and does not overcharge for it. Also, see if the providers stipulates clearly what would happen if the provider does not meet the expectations as mentioned in the SLAs.

It is important that before you begin evaluating an enterprise hosting provider, you must be clear about your own business needs. This will surely make the decision easier. Remember, enterprise hosting is a long-term partnership and you must choose a provider carefully to get the most bang for your bucks!

NaviSite is a leading enterprise hosting and application services provider with over a decade of experience and a network of 16 SAS 70 Type II certified data centers. NaviSite’s rich portfolio of enterprise hosting solutions optimize business-critical IT infrastructure’s performance and provide the flexibility required by enterprises to meet their current as well as future business needs.