If you’re considering moving on-premises equipment away from your business and into a colocation facility, you may have questions about the services available to maintain its performance and security once it’s housed elsewhere.
Or are you investing in hardware and introducing colocation as part of a hybrid model alongside public or private cloud deployments? You might be unsure of your newfound equipment maintenance obligations.
In addition to cybersecurity, backup and virtual disaster recovery, colocation customers are obligated to arrange maintenance and emergency break/fix resource for the servers, cabling and other colocation data centre hardware.
Colocation tenants and server maintenance
If this is new to your business, it is understandable that you’d have reservations about sending your IT teams out on the road for planned and emergency hardware maintenance and fixes. Will they be able to reach the facility quickly enough; will troubleshooting take longer in an unfamiliar environment; will covering travel costs become a spiralling expense, and what happens if they’re short on equipment or resource upon arrival?
Alternatively, working with new employees or contractors may present an unacceptable risk, especially if servers deliver mission-critical functions and highly regulated processes, or store sensitive data.
Today, however, colocation customers have a third option for performing routine maintenance and fixing problems with owned IT hardware – a remote hands service.
What is a remote hands service?
Remote hands is an add-on available from certain colocation providers. It’s an in-person service where dedicated, permanently on-site data centre engineers undertake server, cabling and other owned hardware maintenance on your organisation’s behalf.
Data centre remote hands replaces or can work in collaboration with employees or contractors. It affords tenants an opportunity to use on-site manpower and expertise to ensure that environments are highly optimised, continuously available and resilient.
Remote hands services are typically available from end-to-end providers, like Node4, whose product portfolios span the breadth of digital transformation enablement.
What tasks are performed by a remote hands service?
Whether utilised for planned or emergency work, remote hands services perform a vital business continuity and operational proficiency function.
Typical remote hands services include:
- Routine service and fixing physical issues
- Monitoring and checking ports
- Rebooting servers
- Reporting system indicators
What are the benefits of colocation remote hands?
Higher performance and resilience
Arguably, the biggest benefit of using secure colocation with remote hands is that having engineers on-site reduces the threat of downtime – something that, we all know, could impact business revenue and the ability to deliver services to customers. If downtime breached Service Level Agreements or regulatory obligations, the consequences may extend far beyond the initial event, impacting reputation and even legal integrity.
If deploying mission-critical functions from servers in a colocation facility – such as Enterprise Resource Planning software, Customer Relationship Management software, remote collaboration solutions, secure payment processing or eCommerce websites to name a few – a delay in response (easily caused by congested roads or long journeys) is serious. Highly qualified, long-serving data centre engineers are on-site 24/7, so can react rapidly when an alert is detected and undertake planned maintenance bang on schedule.
Additionally, thorough knowledge of colocation tenant environments empowers remote hands teams to make more effective hardware optimisations in a more efficient manner. Following a value analysis, an organisation may find a remote hands service a lower risk, more cost-efficient means of maintaining server uptime and high performance, ensuring superior performance 100% of the time.
Cost-effectiveness
A remote hands service allows your organisation to be lean and smart with its colocation budget. Rather than covering payroll for a maintenance team or incurring premium emergency call-out contractor costs (weekends, evenings, 3:30 in the morning!), tenants benefit from a specialised, 24/7 service at a significantly lower cost, by virtue of being in a shared facility.
Maintenance and emergency response needs are met and covered by a cost that you agree in advance with a colocation provider. The only additional expenses you face when using a remote hands service are those of replacement hardware, since colocation tenants retain ownership of their own equipment.
Prioritising resource
IT departments have enormous responsibilities. They’re practically responsible for keeping businesses running and as digital transformation progresses, they occupy a key seat at the strategic table. So, wouldn’t organisations rather their technical teams focus on high-skill, high-value tasks that contribute to competitiveness and sustainability, over routine work and firefighting? For most, the answer will be yes. Having remote hands services taking care of the day-to-day and reactivity allows a colocation customer to achieve this.
A Colocation remote hands service is not just advised but, realistically, essential alongside a resiliency and redundancy infrastructure. Not only will remote hands reduce business downtime and save you money, but it’ll also free up in-house IT employees to focus their role on optimising IT operations, manage critical projects and more. In the end, this will allow you to provide better levels of customer service.
To learn more about the benefits of having a remote hands service within any colocation environment, including valuable context to help you to decide on a colocation roadmap, click here to arrange a consultation with Node4 today.