For business, there are so many things that demand additional budget on a daily basis. From an IT perspective, most small to medium sized business owners already make decisions every day regarding what gets funded and what does not. One of the most difficult purchases to convince someone to make is an upgrade of equipment. If the servers are doing the job – no matter how inefficiently, insecurely, or slowly – a server upgrade can be a tough sell.
Here are some of the ways to know that you need a server upgrade, with some ways to speak to those who hold the purse strings.
Reasons Why a Server Upgrade is Smart
- Your Server Ages: Experts estimate that on average, a server’s productivity is decreased by 14% annually. This means that by the time you have owned a server for five years, it is operating at less than 50% of its original efficiency. This aging causes more downtime – as much as 20% more than experienced with a newer server – which can result in a significant loss of revenue. Not only that, but the cost of maintenance goes up the longer you hold onto the server.
- Virtual Servers are More Economical: Late model servers provide greater virtual capability. High-end business applications can now operate in a virtual environment, while requiring fewer machines. This reduces energy costs, data center space requirements, maintenance time and overall licensing costs.
- Stay in Compliance: Contemporary management tools provide improved workload monitoring and tracking, as well as performance data. Modern servers allow organizations to quickly scale and grow. With the most up-to-date firmware and patches, servers more intuitively stay in compliance with legal and government regulations.
- New Servers Predict Your Downtime: Loss of productivity because of downtime can have catastrophic results -companies can lose immediate business from the downtime, and long-term business if disgruntled clients go elsewhere with their business. Utilizing servers beyond their technical and practical life span fail mire often; while newer servers have predictive technologies which can warn you of potential failures before they occur. Combined with full time monitoring such as the capabilities managed services can provide, a business will benefit from automatic notification and proactive support which improves SLAs.
- You’ll Save Money: Service contracts typically last between three to five years, which is considered the average life cycle of a typical server. After this period of time, there are generally more failures, replacement parts become harder to find (and thus more expensive) and labor costs go up. Because of these factors, you may be surprised that it is often more economical to purchase a new server than to try to maintain an older one.
Use Managed Services for a Needed Server Upgrade
One of the most attractive benefits of a managed services partnership is that a third party actually takes on the responsibility for the purchase, maintenance, and upgrade of necessary servers. Because you do not have to carry the overhead and the managed services firm typically enjoys industry discounts, any new equipment is more affordable.
The servers will be maintained professionally, and therefore should remain productive for a longer period of time. By utilizing server virtualization and partitioning, you can share costs with other clients. And because we will monitor the servers for you, downtime and failures are greatly reduced.
For many small to medium sized business, the concept of managed services may seem foreign. But as technology grows more sophisticated and the market demands greater speed and uptime, today is the day to call Alliance IT. Whether a server upgrade, professional monitoring, or assistance with fighting cyber crime – we help Sarasota area businesses to thrive.
