Converged Technology Group IDs Five Hidden Costs of Uptime

ISLANDIA, N.Y., April 8, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- Business and technology executives are acutely aware of the dangers of IT downtime in their organizations – loss of productivity, loss of profitability and lower staff morale to name a few. But there are hidden costs to IT uptime that can be just as damaging to a company's profitability, according to Converged Technology Group (www.convergedtechgroup.com), an award-winning Managed Services Partner (MSP) serving clients throughout the Northeast. The company has created a five-point checklist outlining the hidden costs of IT uptime as well as a complimentary, downloadable eBook to help IT and business professionals identify these danger signs in their own IT departments.

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To help combat costs associated with IT downtime and hidden costs associated with IT uptime, Converged Technology Group developed its Assist360 managed services offering.  Assist360 is a co-managed, customizable, cloud-based suite of managed services designed specifically to help CIOs keep their business-critical technology systems online and secure while offloading much of their daily monitoring and maintenance demands.  In addition to expected services like automated remote monitoring and alerts, SLA-based response and remediation, and help desk support and vendor management, Assist360 also offers unique services that include on-demand consulting to ensure the client's technology is meeting the business' needs and an easy-to-understand dashboard giving the CIO and internal IT staff views of all performance metrics across their company's IT landscape.

"The first step in running a more efficient, cost-effective IT department is in the CIO's willingness to assess where the company is today; whether or not the existing IT staff is able to dedicate any time to mission-critical tasks or just break-fix, lights-on kind of work; and whether or not anyone is willing to admit it if there is a problem," says Steve Drgon, Chief Technology Officer, Converged Technology Group.  "Our Assist360 managed services offering is the result of an intense, two-year R&D effort that greatly expanded the in-depth services we have long offered our clients – including SLA-based incident responses, unlimited help desk support, and complete vendor management – to include consulting and dashboard services that show our clients we truly understand their businesses and the way they want to manage their IT.  Our Assist360 managed services offering is one of the things that makes us a managed services partner to our clients, not just a provider.  Managed services isn't just about offloading backroom services, and it's not about having one throat to choke.  What it should be about – and what it is about at Converged Technology Group – is having one hand to shake."

Five Hidden Costs of IT Uptime
Uptime is a business imperative, but keeping systems up and running can be costly and time consuming.  The question is, how costly and how time consuming? To help CIOs assess where they are and what changes they might want to make, Converged Technology Group has identified five common danger signs, each related to a hidden cost of IT uptime.  Companies that find these profiles a match may need a new managed services strategy to curtail costs and free IT staff for more business-critical tasks.

1. You're running a state-of-the-art data center instead of your business. Mobile computing, Big Data, BYOD – advancements like these make it easy to fall in love with the potential of information technology. System by system, companies grow accustomed to running this entire infrastructure in-house. But now, if this danger sign fits, IT pros realize they've reached a line where they're spending too much time thinking about IT and not enough about their industry or even their own customers.
2. You can't use best-of-class technology because it's too complex for your in-house team to integrate and manage. From software-defined storage to big data analytics, determining the combination of vendors and products that will result in the most efficient and cost-effective solution is a complex undertaking. Hidden compatibility issues can stall seemingly routine deployments and require days of troubleshooting. Some installations require expensive, time-consuming training just to use new technologies. Watch out: Just dealing with multiple vendors' support staffs can keep an overworked IT staff from more business-critical work.
3. You're killing efficiency, customer service and your reputation with downtime and slowdowns – Everyone knows how bad a headline-grabbing system outage can be. Even if the company isn't running a Fortune 500 airline reservation system, ecommerce site or global manufacturing network, slowdowns and crashes – especially those that affect customers – quietly sap revenue, profits and the organization's industry standing.
4. You're missing hidden support costs as you move to the cloud. – While the cloud, including applications and other services delivered via the Internet, can be a sure way to cut costs, the virtualized nature of the cloud requires the licensing of, and staff training in, new tools, and sometimes different tools for different clouds. That means evaluating, choosing, licensing and training IT staff on multiple management platforms as well as potentially extending internal security and access controls to the public cloud, transferring data to a public cloud and retrieving it when moving to a new provider. All of this takes money and significant time to accomplish if the company is relying on its own internal staff alone.
5. You're spending resources with providers rather than investing in partners. – As a business grows and changes, its technology requirements and scope change as well. As a result, it's critical to find and evaluate both current and future needs, including the vendors and service provider the company relies on. Does the managed service provider the organization is currently working with – internally or externally – really understand the company's core business rather than just its technology? Has the company chosen a Managed Services "Provider" of generic help desk, data center or integration services that would fit any business' needs or a Managed Services "Partner" that can proactively suggest creative technology solutions to the company's toughest business problems? Significant changes or growth in the business may require changes in the kind of partners serving that business as well as the quantifiable measurements such as uptime, performance or resolution times previously agreed upon.

More Information:

• Find out how managed services like Assist360 can support IT infrastructure while lowering total cost of ownership: http://ow.ly/urpZz.
• Download an eBook, "The Five Hidden Costs of IT Uptime," to help calculate how much a business is spending on uptime here: http://bit.ly/1h7NecD.
• Watch brief videos on topics ranging from VDI to unified communications and cloud here: http://ow.ly/vdKnA.

About Converged Technology Group
Converged Technology Group is an award-winning Managed Services Partner (MSP) focused on improving IT performance and lowering the cost of technology support for growing businesses in healthcare, financial services, education, retail, legal and other cutting-edge industries. Located in Islandia, NY, and New York City, Converged Technology Group provides network infrastructure, unified communications, virtualized data center, cloud solutions and managed services to multinational enterprises headquartered in the Northeast. The company provides business-critical uptime all the time, and helps clients design, implement and operate their IT infrastructure, communication and computing systems for the greatest return on their IT investments. For more information on Converged Technology Group, please contact us at 631-468-5728 or [email protected], and visit our website at www.convergedtechgroup.com.

Media Contacts:
Anthony Malley
Director Business Development & Marketing
Converged Technology Group
631-468-5728
[email protected]

Lisa Hazen
Account Manager
Communication Strategy Group
631-239-6335
[email protected]

SOURCE Converged Technology Group