Disaster recovery and business continuity can be a challenge to manage effectively. In addition to investing considerable amounts of capital into robust, reliable solutions, you’re stuck with the nagging thought that you’re putting your budget into something you hope you never actually have to use. Anything you can do to simplify your D/R framework comes with an inherent cost advantage, particularly through a reduction in complexity and resource-hours committed to planning and managing the environment.

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Once you’ve made the decision to adopt a managed infrastructure, you need to identify the factors that matter most to your company. Quite simply, you want to know that your infrastructure will be there for you when you need it.

While service-level agreements (SLAs) provide procedures and remedies for downtime, performance degradation and other potential problems, they are inherently retrospective: SLAs talk about how a problem can be fixed. When choosing a managed services provider, you should take a look at the measures in place that will keep problems from arising.

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The in-house versus outsourcing decision shouldn’t be an easy one. After all, you’re infrastructure is at stake … which puts your company’s ability to operate in play. The risks don’t mean that you should choose one option over another, but they do suggest that you should treat this decision with the appropriate gravity.

If you’re thinking about moving to a managed infrastructure, which can come with many advantages, think about the IT resources that your company consumes, as well as how heavily you want to commit to operating and maintaining your own infrastructure. Variable system demand and a desire to focus on your core business while maintaining a lean IT department usually indicate that a managed services approach to your IT infrastructure is prudent.

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In this series, we’ll focus on the implications of specific technology solutions for CFOs. Though they are the keepers of a company’s financial health, they don’t always understand the advantages that come with certain technology solutions, and IT professionals sometimes take a suboptimal approach when explaining these concepts to the finance team. This series is intended to help make those conversations easier and more effective.

You know the drill: the CFO needs to keep costs contained. Meanwhile, the IT department always seems like it’s running too lean. Demands are always increasing, especially as new systems are introduced to increase business efficiency. Every new opportunity to streamline operations across the company seems to come with an incremental burden on the infrastructure. So, what happens to the infrastructure team?

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Have you ever had to deviate from your capacity plan to add equipment? When this happens, you have to do more than dip into your budget and get the requisite approvals. You also need to divert resources from your infrastructure team to plan, execute, test and monitor the change to your server environment, which can cause other projects to fall behind. Expenses increase not only for your datacenter team but for all the IT and business areas affected. Your budget assumes a certain amount of predictability, but real life doesn’t always cooperate.

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For new businesses and entrepreneurs, 2009 was grim. The effects of the financial crisis made it much harder to get a new business off the ground. Venture capital money just wasn’t flowing, and innovation was forced to take a back seat to the survival instinct. We’re experiencing signs of economic recovery now, but it’s still slow and cautious. Nonetheless, new businesses are starting to pop up, and the folks with the cash are beginning to invest again. Cost discipline remains the norm, however, with every dollar allocated carefully. Frankly, it’s the perfect situation for managed services from MTM.

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What if you built a website – or ecommerce capability – and nobody came? Well, that’s the problem you could have if your systems fall apart at the wrong time. There’s no substitute for availability, and an outage can cost you opportunities well into the future. An hour of dark servers can take years for you to overcome.

To combat this risk, many IT departments invest heavily in their infrastructures. Some even over-invest. As a result, there’s an operational imbalance that costs precious IT resources … and the enterprise still isn’t completely protected from serious external threats. A managed infrastructure can provide the layer of protection you need to ensure that a technical problem doesn’t tarnish your reputation in the marketplace.

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The decision to outsource key IT functions is rarely an easy one. All things being equal, the typical instinct cites the importance of maintaining complete control. Yet, the rush to keep everything in house can lead to lost opportunities for cost savings … not to mention the opportunity to use recovered budget on IT initiatives that can move your company forward. There are cases where outsourcing simply makes sense. If your IT department has one of the situations below, it’s time to consider a managed services solution.

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It happens all the time: hours, even days, are added to client pursuits and engagements because of an incident in the datacenter. You may be trying to gather data for a proposal, delivering a service or responding to a support issue, but the network isn’t running smoothly. Or an application goes down … at the worst possible time. You can’t access a particular system when you need it, and you have revenue and your reputation on the line. This is when the ROI case for partnering with a managed service provider is most powerful.

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The buzz around cloud computing is palpable. Though its penetration into IT infrastructures is still relatively low, professionals are discussing the potential of this new technology. Many are considering at least limited implementations to gauge the effectiveness of this approach to computing.

Since the market moves quickly, here are five things you should know about cloud computing when evaluating whether it’s the right move for your datacenter:

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