In my last blog, I mentioned “The FAR Cloud” and I talked a bit about what that means to FAR’s customers. In this blog, I’m going to address the concept in greater detail by explaining what FAR does as an IT managed service provider.

What does “IT managed services” mean?
One of the most common questions I’m asked is: what does FAR do? Most people already know that FAR does something IT related, but information technology is an extremely wide field. There are multiple layers and lots of niches. Historically, most IT firms have specialized in one of a handful of things.

Some IT firms focus on “consulting”, which typically means improving desktop and organization productivity. Some IT firms focus on technical support, and some on custom programming. Still others focus on rolling out and maintaining networks and core infrastructure systems. These are just broad categories, with lots of specific niches (for example, some IT companies focus entirely on setting up, maintaining and troubleshooting their clients’ connections to the Internet).

In contrast, IT managed services firms take a different, more end-to-end approach. IT managed services often includes everything from high-level consulting to very brass tacks technical support and monitoring. As my Chief Marketing Officer says, IT managed services firms provide customers with one back to pat. That’s really what FAR does and part of what sets us apart: we provide small and medium-sized businesses with one back to pat for all of their information technology needs, whether it’s a security audit and analysis, a network implementation, business analysis consulting, or a new laptop.

So, what’s the FAR Cloud?
In my last blog, I discussed the value and hype of cloud computing. I’ll be discussing what to host and what to put in The Cloud in a string of articles over the next few weeks. Cloud computing takes the information technology complexity out of the business premises and moves it to the Internet; FAR takes all of the IT complexities off of our clients’ shoulders, regardless of where the information technology actually sits.

As a managed service provider, FAR provides a cloud of its own so to speak. As far as our customers are concerned, whether a server sits in their server room or is virtualized somewhere on the Internet, FAR makes sure that it works as expected, that it is monitored 24/7 and that it is continuously improved. To use the industry jargon, FAR does the operations, the administration, the management, the provisioning and the troubleshooting (the OAMPT for short) for most of our clients’ IT systems, end-to-end.

Some of our clients have internal IT resources, but most do not. I would say that many of FAR’s clients don’t have an IT team, but that’s not true: that’s the service that FAR provides to them. FAR is their IT team. The FAR Cloud simply refers to the carefully planned, executed and monitored package of information technology software, hardware and software that FARs plans, put into place and then monitors in order to help our clients meet their business challenges.

The FAR Cloud includes doing everything from fixing mice and sound cards when they break, to making sure that servers don’t melt, to network rollouts, to unified communications and voice over IP systems, to making sure the network is secure, and more. “One back to pat” means that if our customers have a business process or information technology challenge, we help them to solve it in a way that’s transparent, but also doesn’t require them to master a lot of technical details. That’s the FAR Cloud.

What’s in it for customers? It’s all about values
The value that IT managed services firms provide to customers it that they (should) take all of that complexity off the customer’s plate, create a solution, put it in place, monitor it, make it work and improve it over time. That’s what the FAR Cloud provides to customers: all of the benefits of an enterprise-level IT solution at a reasonable cost with none of the complexity: peace of mind, the best possible value in terms of meeting their business requirements, and the strongest possible footing for continued growth. If you’re working with an IT vendor who’s not providing that to you, FAR definitely can!

But I’m not just going to say it and hope for the best. Over the next several articles, I’m going to be sharing many of FAR’s insights into what to host and what to keep on premise in terms of your business systems. I’m going to be blogging about how to work with your customers more securely, how to keep your costs low for your email systems, how you can get the most value from a VoIP phone system, how to make unified communications an integral part of your business and a lot more. Be sure to watch this space regularly!

Tags: 24/7 technical support, busines process, cloud computing, FAR Support, IT Services, Microsoft Exchange, the far cloud, virtualized, voice over IP, VoIP

This entry was posted on Friday, January 15th, 2010 at 2:13 pm and is filed under General Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.