One question we get from time to time is whether or not our managed services work the same on cloud-based IaaS—Infrastructure as a Service—and as a PaaS—Platform as a Service—set ups as they do on on-site hardware.

The short answer is yes, they do work the same. It doesn’t affect our services or offerings at all.

We’re already remote anyway, so we’re agnostic to the location of the hardware to do everything we need to do in the first place. The hardware is just in a different data center.

We actually set all of our managed services up with that in mind more than a decade ago. Back in the 2000s, we had a client move all their hardware to a data center that had the bandwidth they needed.

At the time, the “cloud” wasn’t a term that was being used. It was known as a hosted solution in a data center. The data center provided all the telecommunications and security their system needed. The cloud has just taken it to another level with virtualization technology.

We were able to provide managed services remotely for that client, and it didn’t matter that their hardware had moved. Ever since, our managed services have been location agnostic.

You might wonder if cloud-based solutions will take care of your database and software as well. They won’t.

Sure, the system administrator piece is offloaded to your cloud provider. That could be Amazon, it could be Microsoft, or it could be Oracle. They’ll take care of your physical hardware, your operating system. But above that in the stack is your responsibility, including your database and software.

Of course, below that in the stack, you still have to hold the cloud provider accountable. If there are any real issues, you still need technical minds conversing with the cloud resource provider to determine what’s going on.

Our managed services still operate just like they would on servers you have on-site. It’s a seamless process for us and doesn’t affect our offerings at all.

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