Among all its service features, which one do you think makes your hosting company stand out? Is it the speed that you offer, the uptime that you maintain, the price that you propose or the outsourced technical support that you provide? As answered by a survey, all these are important precisely in that order! So, as you would’ve guessed it right, the speed and up-time you offer are the biggest deciding factors for your audience to choose you over your competition. Apart from this, at least one fifth of the respondents in the survey mentioned technical support to be their biggest deciding criteria for choosing the hosting company.
Regardless of where technical support stands among the selection criteria of your customers for choosing you, it is eventually what makes or breaks a deal. And once you know that technical support is critical to your business, you can appreciate what important it holds to hire industry experts as the technical support provider for your hosting business. So, here are the reasons why it is important for you in the first place: 1. Cost-effectiveness Building even a small in-house support team for 24/7 outsourced web hosting support can cost you an arm and a leg. So, it is any day a wiser decision to outsource technical support to proven industry experts rather than hiring a team and paying it for their round-the-clock services along with their specialized skill-set. This is not only convenient but also, quite affordable for your business. 2. Round-the-clock availability Not just their affordable price helps you effectively increase your bottom line, but it is their promise of a round-the-clock support, upon which you can conveniently base your hosting company’s promise of offering top quality support services without any interruption. And your business can avail this without having to maintain the extensive infrastructure and facilities required to maintain it. 3. Scalability While it can be tricky to scale-up or scale-down in case of your in-house support team where it leads to ‘hiring and firing’ of your employees, in case of outsourced hosting technical support, it is rather easy to scale. This is because your hosting business can leverage the flexible technical support packages offered by the industry experts to scale up or down as and when required which becomes more convenient for you in this case. 4. Improved growth focus & efficiency On opting for outsourcing technical support from industry experts, you can allocate your resources to focus on other more business-critical tasks that help you grow your business faster. So, this serves to bring in more efficiency & growth focus to your operations. This is because no more of your valuable time gets wasted in resolving at least the support related issues so that more critical issues can now be handled better. 5. Complete coverage for Holidays There are many online businesses for which holiday season holds special importance and therefore, good amount of coverage during this time is needed for them. Since hosting issues won’t wait to come up till the holidays get over, the contribution of your outsourcing partner towards providing coverage during holiday season matters a great deal. 6. Easy access to Industry Experts It is a lot easier to gain access to industry experts at affordable rates when you hire outsourcing technical support for your hosting business as compared to when you need to hire the domain experts on a full-time basis while building an in-house support team. So, unless you can spend extravagantly just on the technical support aspect of your hosting business, outsourcing offers you easy access to a vast talent pool in the industry. These are just a few key reasons why a hosting company should consider outsourcing technical support for their business and choose it over building an in-house support team. As your expert outsourcing partners offer top-class support to your customers it becomes easier for you to get an edge over your competition. So, it is important for you to carefully select your 24/7 web hosting technical support services provider partner.
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DevOps is fast getting adopted across organizations as one of the most popular ways to efficiently accomplish software deliveries and security updates. And this does not anymore remain confined to the client project deliveries but has also been implemented to the internal projects by most of these businesses. The very philosophy of DevOps lies in the speed, reliability and efficiency it imparts to your processes. This is enabled by inculcating a collaborative work environment with speedy and frequent releases and automation coupled with cloud based tool-set. The recent surge in the interest shown by most organizations for DevOps stems mainly from its beneficial aspects including development of high quality bugs-free products, high degree of innovation, one click-deployments and many more.
In short, DevOps lets you add more speed & reliability to your software delivery. Despite being cognizant of all its benefits, many organization still find it challenging to successfully implement this new method to their existing work-flow so as to reap its real benefits. This post is therefore, about some useful tips that can help your organization get a good head-start when it comes to implementing DevOps to your work-flow: 1. Take small steps to start & scale-up later Considering any organization’s innate resistance to change, it makes perfect sense to begin with taking small steps towards DevOps or implementing it at a rather small scale and later, moving forward with the scaling up process. This can prove to be effective if you are successful at getting positive results while starting on a small scale, whereas if we are to undertake it on a large scale right away, it can take longer & have more chances of failure owing to a variety of factors. So, instead of attempting to automate the processes from end-to-end, you can focus on smaller steps such as continuous integration or simply practicing frequent changes to small batch-size in a project. So, ideally a DevOps project should be started large enough to be able to solve something of significance – to get measurable results and small enough to manage the risks associated with it – for ensuring a successful – scoping the project right is the key here. 2. Experiment. Try. Fail. Learn. Repeat! It is not just DevOps that serves to bring in agility to your operations but the best practice is to add an element of agility to your DevOps implementation itself. The meaning thereby is that the organizations that are well-adapted to the culture of learning through experimentation and open to accepting and coping with the failures incidental to this process will have an edge over the others for successful implementation of DevOps. This is the reason why smaller organizations and start-ups typically find it easier to successfully adopt DevOps in their work culture as an integral part of it. Since DevOps requires you to calibrate and standardize various aspects such as which all tools may be required, the organization must get into the learning mode at all levels while implementing DevOps. So, it is more like you need to plan about what goal your business wants to achieve and then you start your journey to this goal and learn how to go, along the way! In this case, it helps if the bottlenecks are identified and discussed among the team early on – which may be the reason why you may need to hire the industry experts such as InstaCarma to handhold you. 3. Build flexibility & the accommodation for failure The organizations need to build the ability to accommodate failures rather than just doing away with the possibilities of failures. With all the experimentation required as a part of rolling out this new technology and with all the trial and error, failures are bound to be encountered. So, if the organization is ready with the mindset to accommodate those failures, it is ready to welcome the DevOps culture with open arms. So, DevOps requires the change management process of your organization to become more scalable, decentralized and compatible with your teams’ understanding as to how to respond as you move ahead. 4. Take your team along as you plan & move ahead A successful DevOps implementation requires you to take everyone in your organizational hierarchy along as you move ahead. This requires you to study and analyze the motivation level of every individual contributor for working in a cross-team collaborative environments and, how reward & incentivize them to reinforce the desired behaviors in them. Buying in people matters even more in the service industry where it is not just the running of database, infrastructure or the network matters but what matters here is the running of the database that can help the development teams deliver real value. So, the desired outcome of the entire exercise is the continuous delivery of qualitative software. 5. Inculcate the culture of ‘no blame on anyone’ As you embark on your DevOps journey, you must adopt an organizational culture of ‘no blame on anyone’. So, when an issue arises the focus ought to be around ‘what’ went wrong and not on ‘who’ did it wrong. The foundation of DevOps lies in creation of mutually trusting and collaborative environment which is just not possible with a ‘blaming’ and ‘punishing’ mindset. So, focus on positive reinforcement of the desired behavior rather than negative. This will help you achieve a work culture where you can do away with the organizational and information silos. With a more solution-oriented approach, the setbacks can be managed more effectively without the need to put the blame on people. As an organization setting its initial steps in the world of DevOps, these are some of the basics you can follow. Adoption of DevOps is going to be a ‘learn-as-you-go’ process for your business regardless of its industry type and size. This is the reason why having experienced DevOps professionals to handhold you through the process helps you identify the possible glitches better and ensure that your organization can successfully adopt to this new & effective method of software delivery. In times when the DevOps movement is in its full swing specially across the IT organizations, the way IT professionals view it is rather scattered and therefore the need to have a single view combining all aspects of DevOps is felt. Contrary to the popular belief, DevOps is not just confined to Development and operations but its scope is rather wide. To get an all-encompassing view of it and develop a better understanding of its scope, this article is an attempt to cover the key elements of DevOps.
Key elements of DevOps: 1. Customers The first and foremost element of DevOps enablement is the customer for any organization. The first step is to understand the need of a customer to work out the solution that perfectly fits the bill for this need. Customer feedbacks are therefore instrumental in driving your DevOps movement. Hence, with the right strategy in place only can an organization get an insight into a 360-degree view of how its customer-facing systems are performing in terms of delivering business value to the customers. It also gives an insight into the consumer behavior based on which the organization can perform its ‘what-if’ analyses to mold its marketing and sales strategy accordingly. With the agile method of DevOps, the organizations are now quicker at responding to the market needs. 2. Business While it may be important to implement DevOps for every organization regardless of its type and size, each organization is unique and so is its need to implement DevOps. So, your DevOps Implementation Service provider would design unique strategy tailored to cater to your exact needs. And before that, the business needs to consider whether an end-to-end implementation is required to meet their goals in the first place. If we take the analogy of a vehicle, while DevOps acts as a fuel to drive the lean practices in IT, the key to it is the organizational values and culture and the developmental methodology acts as its driver. With this example, it is rather easy to understand that making the right choice of fuel (DevOps Strategy) is critical to achieving top performance for your business operations. Just the way not every fuel can work with every vehicle, the businesses need to design the right blend of strategy to optimize their performance. 3. Development DevOps serves to automate the tedious and manually accomplished tasks pertaining to build and deployment to let the developers focus on their key skills and make the most of those in adding to the productivity of the organization. While the developers enrich the organizations with the right set of tools and techniques, this adds value in terms of embedding good practices and processes to make the lives of the developers easier and make the entire process of development more efficient. 4. Operations DevOps has been popular for its role as a bridge or an interface between the development and IT operations departments of an organization where it ensures that the two work closely, eliminating any scope for conflict between the two departments. DevOps culture encourages that any system is evaluated by both simultaneously for its scope and the impact of the changes planned leading to continuous development and improvement in the processes with a real-time evaluation. There has been growing consensus on the concept of this technique and all the above aspects taken together, impart a single-view of 360° DevOps. By implementing DevOps strategy that is the best-suited to your organization, the possibility and scope of organizational growth is immense. No wonder why it has been generating a lot of buzz in the market lately. There can be two use-case scenarios for DevOps implementation – it is either implemented by setting-up a strategy from the scratch as an integral part of the business strategy, when you are starting up a new business or it is implemented to the established organizations wherein the business needs to consider its transition to a new model of working, after a detailed study and analysis of the existing systems. By focusing on the key factors and constraints in both the cases, DevOps can be implemented keeping its 360° view in mind and your business can forge ahead into its journey towards lean practices in IT. |
AuthorInstacarma offers seamless, Reliable and cost effective outsourced web hosting support, Datacenter services, Cloud migration services & helpdesk support to web hosting companies around the globe. Archives
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