The Key to Data-Driven Success for Mid-Market Companies Starts Here
The Key to Data-Driven Success for Mid-Market Companies Starts Here
What’s the #1 pain point for IT professionals? According to the business knowledge resource Insights for Professionals, it’s data center management. With this reality in mind, the foundation of digital transformation success for a data-driven business must begin at the data center level, where servers store your data, CPUs power your computations, and your systems are ideally kept stable, operational, and secure for all users, including those accessing company systems and data from multiple remote locations. Competitive mid-market companies rely on data center engineers who specialize in uptime by proactively preventing downtime, as well as connectivity, storage, security, and monitoring.
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Aunalytics Managed IT Services Safeguard Local Government Against Disruptive Weather, Cyber, and Pandemic Events
Partnering with Aunalytics for managed IT services has proven to be an extremely beneficial decision for one Ohio county government. Logan County, Ohio, has faced several significant events over the past few years, including severe weather, cyberattacks, and of course the pandemic—all of which challenged the resiliency of the county’s IT infrastructure.
As a primarily rural area, the county is in short supply of experienced technology professionals available to assist with IT management. As a result, the decision was made to contract with a skilled managed IT services provider with regional operations. This has evolved into what is today a strategic relationship with Aunalytics where the IT services and solution provider is integrated both horizontally and vertically to oversee nearly all aspects of the county’s IT operations. This includes oversight of applications, as well as servers, storage, endpoint devices, security, networking, and data protection to ensure business continuity.
This partnership has been particularly beneficial as Logan County has faced a series of challenging events:
- A powerful storm damaged the county’s courthouse, resulting in a complete closure and relocation of court staff and systems. The IT and business recovery experts at Aunalytics helped to set up transitional offices, upgrade servers, desktops and laptops to enable remote access to all required information stores, allowing the court to proceed with operations. Once repairs to the courthouse were complete, relocation support back to the building began and re-orchestration of all IT infrastructure was completed by the Aunalytics’ IT services and support team.
- In early 2021, the Jobs and Family Services Office was also severely damaged after the weight of ice and snow collapsed the roof, necessitating evacuation to a temporary facility. As with the damaged courthouse, the managed IT services team coordinated with a rented facility prior to occupancy and wired the location for operations, minimizing downtime and facilitating the quick re-opening of the temporary office location in order to return services to the community.
- The past 12 months have also seen a recurring stream of cyberattacks, where Aunalytics has defended the county’s sensitive data and systems from downtime. However, in one instance, a server at the sheriff’s headquarters was struck by an attack, resulting in a printer issue. The attack occurred on a Friday when Aunalytics took immediate action and rectified the printer issue over the weekend, returning it to proper operation by Monday morning.
- Adding to the challenges, the COVID-19 pandemic began in March of 2020, causing a number of IT issues as county employees worked remotely, exposing a large number of computing endpoints in the form of laptops, desktops, printers and other network-connected devices outside of the county walls. Aunalytics assisted by improving virtual private network (VPN) services for much higher traffic volumes than usual and managed these systems so that county employees could re-establish their work environments from home where they would be protected against the contagious and, in some cases, deadly virus.
Measuring Success
The county measures the success of its outsourced IT operations by looking at uptime and risk mitigation. Aunalytics has provided an IT services foundation that reduces the number of internal employee hours allocated to IT management and monitoring. Aunalytics enables Logan County staff to work remotely in a much more efficient and reliable manner than otherwise possible. Furthermore, both the security and disaster recovery capabilities implemented have been exceptional, guarding the county against serious downtime for many years.
According to Jack Reser, Auditor of Logan County, “The causes of downtime in a distributed IT infrastructure can be innumerable and the county has definitely had its share of events putting its services at risk. However, Aunalytics has been a reliable IT services partner, quickly responding to our challenges and with expertise that ensures we are returned to the people’s business without delay. Aunalytics has been a steadfast IT partner that we plan to work with closely in 2022 and beyond.”
Learn more about how Aunalytics Managed IT Services have benefitted the Logan County government by downloading the full case study.
Lowering Cybersecurity Insurance Premiums with Managed Security Services - PDF
Lowering Cybersecurity Insurance Premiums with Managed Security Services
Midmarket organizations face the threat of cyberattacks that put every organization at great risk. As a result, a greater number of IT professionals are turning to managed security services to lower cybersecurity insurance premiums.
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Data Scientists Need Usable Data
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The Key to Data-Driven Success for Mid-market Companies Starts Here
The Key to Data-Driven Success for Mid-Market Companies Starts Here
What’s the #1 pain point for IT professionals? According to the business knowledge resource Insights for Professionals, it’s data center management. With this reality in mind, the foundation of digital transformation success for a data-driven business must begin at the data center level, where servers store your data, CPUs power your computations, and your systems are ideally kept stable, operational, and secure for all users, including those accessing company systems and data from multiple remote locations. Competitive mid-market companies rely on data center engineers who specialize in uptime by proactively preventing downtime, as well as connectivity, storage, security, and monitoring.
Effectively managing data to support accessibility and security requires consistent monitoring and up-to-date solutions. Yet the latest research shows that investing in on-premise infrastructure for data management, compliance, and analytics is too pricey for most mid-market companies — and from the view of many IT directors, on-premise solutions have already morphed into old relics. In 2022, Insights for Professionals reported that nearly two-thirds (63 percent) of senior IT leaders and company executives aren’t planning to attempt to maintain servers on-premise. Instead, the majority of leaders surveyed plan to invest in cloud infrastructure as a service.
Moving into the Future
In short, entire businesses are migrating to the cloud, not just the technology. The infinite growth of data, applications, connections, and workloads will only further exacerbate businesses’ ability to adapt to new lines of business applications and platforms, meet security and governance requirements, and seamlessly orchestrate and analyze data for business outcomes. As a result, a growing number of mid-market companies are recognizing the value of working with partners to transition storage, computing, backup, and hosting services to cloud-based platforms to leverage the scale and compute power they can provide.
Gartner reports that by 2025, the vast majority — 85 percent — of enterprises will have already shifted over to a cloud-first approach. How did this changing of the guard occur so quickly? According to Gartner, it can be traced in part to the COVID-19 pandemic, which has accelerated cloud adoption since 2020, ushering it in as the “de facto new normal.” Gartner analysts including Gregor Petri even go so far as to state that “enterprise architecture and technology leaders should reject any new product that does not follow ‘cloud first’ as a guiding principle.”
Mid-Market Essentials
There are solid reasons behind mid-market businesses moving their data out of on-premise environments, particularly due to the efficiencies obtained from cloud-based business applications in multi-cloud and hybrid environments. This brings us back to data center vendors, who must then be ready to absorb the responsibility and cost of infrastructure capital expenses and maintenance — and it looks like many are already prepared to do so. In 2022 alone, nearly one-third (32 percent) of those surveyed by Insights for Professionals were planning to invest heavily in cloud management, to the tune of $500,000, while nearly 30 percent plan to spend even more. The largest part of this cloud management investment is being channeled toward security, with enterprises intending to spend 82 percent of this budget on data protection.
This is not a passing trend and is expected to have long-term consequences for purchase decisions in mid-market companies. By 2023, as scalability and cohesive cloud ecosystems join the ranks among the top three buying considerations for IT, Gartner anticipates that cloud architects will become key stakeholders when choosing tools for analytics and business intelligence. Here’s another surprising statistic to show the direction we’re heading in: while hyper-scale cloud providers (hyper-scalers) delivered and managed less than 1 percent of installed edge computing platforms in 2020, Gartner predicts this number to balloon to 20 percent by the end of 2023.
Different Needs for Mid-Market Players
There’s a catch, though, about hyper-scalers: most are not built for the mid-market. Therefore, mid-market companies won’t be able to reap the maximum benefit from the ability of traditional hyper-scale cloud providers to bring global business solutions, outsourcing, and consulting capabilities that can help other types of organizations migrate to, adopt, and build cloud-native offerings. It’s true that traditional hyper-scalers excel in leveraging the expertise of their cloud professionals to consult for platform re-architecture, application development, data migration, and transitioning services from technology stacks into macro- and microservices hosted in a data center on-premise, private cloud, public cloud (or any multi-cloud or hybrid combination thereof) — but not generally for mid-market companies.
Let’s drill down into some specific problems for mid-market players around hyper-scale cloud providers:
- It can be cost-prohibitive to obtain the level of help that most mid-market companies require, since most hyper-scalers are priced for large enterprises. Mid-market companies tend to need “white glove” services, which carry the highest price tag.
- Greater needs. Enterprises are more likely to already have in-house teams with the necessary skillsets to work with traditional hyper-scalers, compared to mid-market businesses that often have higher needs for expert help.
- No data analytics. While many enterprise hyper-scalers help migrate data to third-party cloud vendor platforms, their services end there, as they don’t offer data analytics.
Mid-market companies need technical experts to help build solutions on a mid-market budget — specifically, they require a hyper-scaler capable of providing an end-to-end solution focused on the mid-market sector. The goal in evaluating potential solutions providers should be for the cloud foundation to operate seamlessly with end-to-end data management and analytics solutions. With an end-to-end solution, mid-market businesses have the opportunity to obtain the results they desire without wasting time on a “Frankenstein” approach, assembling parts and pieces of multiple technologies and tools in an attempt to construct a reliable system that actually works. It’s only by going the end-to-end route that mid-market companies can receive the greater level of assistance they need on the technology front, as well as benefit from the robust data and analytics skillsets necessary to achieve meaningful business outcomes, without paying enterprise prices.
Why Mid-Market Organizations Need Digital Transformation Solutions that Combine the Right Technology and Talent to Achieve Business Value
At Aunalytics, we know that an organization’s everyday data holds value, yet is a resource that often remains untapped. This is especially true for the mid-market—this market segment has been underserved and often lacks access to data management and analytics technologies and expertise. Our mission is to empower the mid-market with solutions that enable digital transformation so they can compete and stay relevant.
Digital transformation calls for mid-market companies to shift away from operational silos and work across the company to harness the power of data. This requires the integration of diverse technology across all functional business areas to enable convergence, promote a positive cultural change, drive customer value, and facilitate operational agility. Gartner’s report “Over 100 Data and Analytics Predictions Through 2025” asserts that by 2024, 75% of organizations will have established a centralized data and analytics center of excellence to support federated data and analytics initiatives and prevent enterprise failure. By 2023, organizations with shared companywide data management goals, including stewardship, governance, and semantics to enable inter-enterprise data sharing, will outperform those that don’t.
There is a recipe for successfully transforming massive amounts of corporate and third-party data created and used daily in your lines of business into a valuable asset. But to achieve business outcomes, organizations need to implement digital transformation solutions that include the right technologies/tools combined with the right talent.
The Right Tools and Technology
Mid-market companies generally do not currently have the tools needed to find value in their data through advanced analytics and AI. An enterprise data warehouse is only one piece of the puzzle. Successful mid-market digital transformation requires the appropriate storage and compute infrastructure, data management platform, and analytics software. It can be difficult to piece together each of these components into a single, unified system—it is expensive, time-consuming, and inefficient.
To solve this challenge, Aunalytics has developed a robust, cloud-native data platform built for universal data access, powerful analytics, and AI. Mid-market businesses benefit from using an end-to-end, cloud-based platform as it moves the burden of infrastructure procurement and maintenance to a third-party vendor in the data industry. An end-to-end platform is secure, reliable, and scalable while including the added benefit of being deployed and managed as a service. This is especially important for mid-market businesses because finding the right talent to execute digital transformation initiatives is extremely challenging in the current market.
The Right Talent and Expertise
Most IT departments do not currently have the skill sets needed for getting business value out of data. At the same time, for most mid-market companies, it does not make business sense to hire an entire division of highly compensated data experts to achieve digital transformation goals. Even if a mid-market company can find and hire these scarce resources—they were hard to come by even before the Talent War of 2022.
Establishing a side-by-side partnership with a data platform company is the key to gaining the benefits of working with experts including cloud engineers, data engineers, security experts, data scientists and other highly skilled technical resources to achieve true business value. By getting expert help, you can devote your company’s time, resources, and innovation to your business and focus on what you do best.
Aunalytics provides a team of experts who assist every step of the way. Mid-market businesses will have access to the right tools, resources, and support throughout our end-to-end process. Our team also includes industry experts who help businesses identify areas in which data can provide the most value, and guidance on how to work toward achieving these goals.
Aunalytics’ Digital Transformation Solution Gives Mid-Sized Businesses Answers
With Aunalytics, you get the technology and expertise required to complete the journey from data to actionable business results. This combination accelerates digital transformation, which allows businesses to realize the value of their investment quickly. By taking advantage of the experienced data professionals at Aunalytics, organizations can save time and avoid making costly mistakes while also maximizing the value currently hidden in their data.
eBook: What Mid-Market Companies Need for Data-Driven Success and How to Get It
What Mid-Market Companies Need for Data-Driven Success and How to Get It
Using your data as an asset to drive competitive business growth and achieve cost cutting operational efficiencies is imperative for a company to compete, survive, and thrive. Increasingly, data and analytics have become a primary driver of business strategy and the potential of data-driven business strategies is greater today than ever.
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What Mid-Market Companies Need for Data-Driven Success and How to Get It
What Mid-Market Companies Need for Data-Driven Success and How to Get It
Using your data as an asset to drive competitive business growth and achieve cost cutting operational efficiencies is imperative for a company to compete, survive, and thrive. Increasingly, data and analytics have become a primary driver of business strategy and the potential of data-driven business strategies is greater today than ever.
Aunalytics Managed IT Services Safeguard Logan County Ohio Against Disruptive Weather, Cyber, and Pandemic Events
Aunalytics Managed IT Services Safeguard Logan County Ohio Against Disruptive Weather, Cyber, and Pandemic Events
![Logan County Case Study](https://www.aunalytics.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/Logan-County-Case-Study.png)