Cloud Services

What are Cloud Services?

Cloud computing is a relatively new term that typically describes anything that involves delivering hosted services over the Internet. These services are broadly divided into three categories: Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). The name cloud computing was inspired by the cloud symbol that's often used to represent the Internet in flow charts and diagrams.

Since Cloud services are delivered from a central location like a data center, they provide many benefits including:

1. Lower Costs

   – Cloud computing pools all of the computing resources that can be distributed to applications as needed – optimizing the use of the sum of the computing resources and delivering better efficiency and utilization of the entire shared infrastructure.
   
   

2. Cap-Ex Free Computing

   – Whether you go with a public cloud or outsourced private cloud computing option, cloud computing delivers a better cash flow by eliminating the capital expense associated with building the server infrastructure.
   
   

3. Deploy Projects Faster

   – Because servers can be brought up & destroyed in a matter of minutes, the time to deploy a new application drops dramatically with cloud computing.  Rather than installing and networking a new hardware server, the new server can be dialed up and imaged in through a self-serve control console.  Or better yet, with a private cloud, your service provider can dial up a new server with a single call or support ticket.
   
   

4. Scale as Needed

   – As your applications grow, you can add storage, RAM and CPU capacity as needed.  This means you can buy “just enough” and scale as the application demands grow.
   
   

5. Lower Maintenance Costs

   driven by 2 factors:  Less hardware and outsourced, shared IT staff.  Because cloud computing uses less physical resources, there is less hardware to power and maintain.  With an outsourced cloud, you don’t need to keep server, storage, network, and virtualization experts on staff full time.  You get economy of scale of those expert resources through your cloud provider.
   
   

6. Resiliency and Redundancy

   – One of the benefits of a private cloud deployment is that you can get automatic failover between hardware platforms and disaster recovery services to bring up your server set in a separate data center should your primary data center experience an outage.
   
   

Cloud Services for Small Businesses

For the small business, the most common cloud options include:

Hosted Microsoft Exchange

Microsoft Exchange Server is the most widely used business messaging platform which combines an advanced e-mail solution with collaboration and information sharing features. With a hosted Exchange service, customers’ email, tasks, calendars, contacts and files are centrally stored at the hosting providers’ data center and can be accessed using Microsoft Outlook from a users’ desktop (more...)

Hosted Email Archiving

Email is critical to your business communications, but it brings with it a host of new problems - dealing with storage limits, periodic backups, problematic PST files, access to old emails and regulatory compliance or eDiscovery requests just to name a few. Failure to address these problems effectively can bring serious repercussions. (more...)

Hosted Microsoft SharePoint

Microsoft SharePoint is a set of information infrastructure tools that super-charge teamwork across geographical boundaries by providing web-based access to advanced tools for project collaboration, document sharing, and meeting management, as well as a platform for building customized web-based applications and services. Windows SharePoint enables simplified collaboration with a single point of information access to improve teamwork and facilitate the management of projects and processes. (more...)

Hosted Spam Protection

OptfinITy hosted Spam Protection is a managed email security service that provides email users with unprecedented control over access to their Inbox. In addition to blocking unwanted mail, such as spam and viruses, OptfinITy hosted spam protection helps organizations and their employees become safer from phishing attacks and other email based network attacks by removing the threat before it even arrives at the mail server. (more...)

Google Apps

Google Apps is Google’s version of a web based version of the popular Microsoft Office Software Suite.  With Google Apps, you have access to all of their open source Collaboration tools. (more...)

Online Backup

Online backup is an online service that contains many powerful yet simple to use features. Using Online Backup gives you backup tools previously enjoyed only by Fortune 500 companies, but with an interface designed for anyone to be able to use. (more....)

Virtual Private Servers (VPS)

Virtual private servers are also known as Virtual dedicated servers. They display a form of virtualization that split a single physical server into multiple virtual servers. This practice of dividing a single virtual server to make it appear as multiple virtual servers has been commonly observed in mainframe computers but not until recently has it been made so easy to obtain by small businesses. (more....)

Virtual Desktop

With the ever increasing prices of upgrading desktop computers, virtualization of the desktop is becoming very appealing.  What Virtual Desktops allow you to do is provide an inexpensive device and then store all of the software, data and other components on a central server, rather than on expensive desktop computers.   (more....)

Website Hosting (Unix and Windows)

Each web site has unique needs, whether it is using a Windows CMS Such as our award winning CMS Works or a Unix based platform to run various PHP scripts, and that is why we offer both Windows and Unix Website Hosting.  In addition to our top of the line shared and dedicated hosting solutions, we offer top line support and 24 hour monitoring, making sure your system remains accessible at all times.   (more....)