Hosting

"In addition to virtualisation and cloud computing, hosting is the third major element that is playing a key role helping organisations to evolve their IT infrastructure from an inflexible computing resource into a next generation service delivery platform. Hosting can mean lots of different things to different people - depending where you’re coming from. Consumers use their ISPs to host personal webpages, small businesses might use a hosting service to support a transactional e-commerce system, while larger organisations can take advantage of a larger managed service partner with a network of data centres to look after their complex, multi-site, multi-country IT requirements."

"Given this variety of possible deployments, it’s clear that there can’t be a single, one-size-fits-all approach to solving organisations’ hosting needs. That’s why Maxima’s hosting solutions are designed to meet individual customer requirements, and typically involve the integration of a broad range of different elements, including applications, hardware, voice and telephony solutions, user desktop management, networking, ISP services, virtualisation support, website integration, disaster recovery as well as physical data centre support.

Defining customer requirements
It’s this sheer range of potential hosting components that makes Maxima such an ideal partner for organisations currently assessing their next generation IT requirements. We always begin our hosting projects by identifying just what it is that customers are trying to achieve. Maybe they’ve got budgetary pressures and want to control their IT costs, perhaps they’re looking for greater flexibility, or considering moving their IT capability to a hosted environment for greater scalability to support planned growth. Others might need a more secure IT service, or maybe a more resilient infrastructure, perhaps so they can ensure a guaranteed performance to meet SLA targets.

Hosting also makes a logical component of the most successful virtualisation projects, allowing organisations to optimise the potential benefits beyond simply reducing their physical number of servers used. An example here might be a business that deploys a virtualisation programme to cut 150 servers all running different applications down to a much more efficient 30 systems, operating far more cost-effectively in a hosted, resilient environment. In addition to significantly reducing the amount of physical space and power needed to operate their systems, the business also benefits from increased availability, improved business continuity, as well as the re-assurance that comes from relying on an infrastructure that is monitored and managed on a 24x7x12 basis.

Not surprisingly, hosting also sits at the heart of Maxima’s drive towards cloud computing. It’s easy to get lost in all the on-demand and as-a-service aspects of cloud, while forgetting that underpinning it all Maxima propositions can also incorporate a state-of-the-art hosting infrastructure to support all this online service delivery!

Prospects wanting to take advantage of trends such as virtualisation, cloud computing and software-as-a-service will need to rely on a strong hosting services partner that can address all aspects of their infrastructure needs. In addition to providing such a core hosting capability, Maxima can also re-assure customers with our ability to deliver in key areas such as operational management, 24x7x12 monitoring and management, as well as the highest levels of connectivity and network infrastructure support.

Best practice data centre infrastructure
At Maxima we can call on over ten years’ specialist hosting expertise to help meet evolving customer requirements. Because we can support all aspects of hosting – from the initial provision of shared servers and capacity-on-demand, through to major multi-site, multi-country implementations that handle an organisation’s entire IT estate – we provide customers with the opportunity to effectively de-risk aspects of their IT management.

To support these and other emerging hosting requirements, we have invested in a best practice data centre hosting infrastructure that combines Tier 1 world class data centre facilities - offering co-location capabilities - with truly redundant multi-gigabit, high speed Internet connections that deliver 99.999% availability. We’ve also ensured that our hosting solutions are based on a fully resilient service and application delivery platform that ensures no single points of failure.

By removing barriers and helping businesses increase their IT agility, and reduce the risk associated with owning and operating complex computing and communications environments, Maxima leaves customers free to focus their resources on other key business areas where they can deliver improved value. At the same time, they can be sure that in selecting Maxima and our comprehensive hosting and managed service capabilities, they can rely on our best practice hosting operations as their IT service delivery platform."