By Russ Levanway, President
As I shared last month, TekTegrity is merging with Santa Barbara County’s CIO Solutions. So, what’s in it for our clients?
In past posts, I’ve talked about the cloud: what it is, the technology behind it, its status in the San Luis Obispo & Fresno regions, and what all of that means to our clients. Currently, a relatively small percentage of our clients use cloud services as core infrastructure. That means, instead of building infrastructure in their office, these clients choose instead to move it to a hosted environment or data center off-site. The switch to cloud services for infrastructure (often called in tech jargon an IaaS or Infrastructure as a Service) has great benefits. Instead of large capital outlays for new equipment every few years, the infrastructure is typically available for a monthly service that is rolled into IT support. Dedicated server closets and air conditioning are no longer necessary.
Much simplicity is gained.
Simplicity isn’t the only major benefit of moving to the cloud; increasingly, there can be a cost advantage, too. For many (though not all) of our clients, bandwidth is now available at a price point that’s starting to making sense. Here in San Luis Obispo County, providers for high speed internet, such as DigitalWest, have worked with municipalities to invest in laying fiber whenever new construction happens. As more and more goes in, and as more and more users tap into it, the price per user decreases significantly. The same can increasingly be said in Fresno and surrounding communities.
I’ve said it before: cloud services can only be adopted successfully and affordably when bandwidth is fast, cheap and reliable―all three. In Santa Barbara County, the availability of high speed bandwidth has been a little ahead of San Luis Obispo and Fresno Counties, but that gap is closing, thanks to these aggressive efforts to add bandwidth capacity. I feel we’re at an inflection point where bandwidth is no longer holding us back from providing the cloud to the majority of our clients as a viable option for their infrastructure.
Does that mean that it’s fast, cheap and reliable for all of our clients, in every area we serve? No. But, like I said, the gap is closing.
Thanks in part to great strategic thinking, and in part to the widespread availability of fast, cheap, and reliable bandwidth CIO Solutions has an outstanding portfolio of cloud solutions and cloud platforms for clients of every size. The next time our clients need to invest in their infrastructure, the next upgrade they need to make when their servers are too old, it may be time for them to make the jump to a cloud solution. We know that there’s a tried, tested, and mature platform with CIO, and we’re excited that the next time we meet with our clients on life-cycle changes, we’ll have it to offer. As for data security, private cloud solutions that we deploy as CIO Solutions meet the most stringent HIPAA compliance standards for data protection. The company is also SOC 2 type 1 and 2 compliant, which are difficult accreditations to achieve.
In a nutshell, our clients will benefit greatly from this merger in many ways, but specifically as several factors converge: greater bandwidth availability at a more affordable cost, a more mature technology, and a strong existing cloud infrastructure with CIO Solutions.
