Quest Blog | Quest Technology Management

Opportunity knocks: Customized cloud solutions

As you move toward providing technology solutions , how your efforts generate revenue changes dramatically. Much of your revenue will come from recurring service-oriented business rather than price- and product-based transactions.

A prime example of this is customized cloud services — what we at Quest call shape-your-own cloud, which takes advantage of the best of public and private clouds.

The difference between customized clouds and public clouds (think Amazon , Google , etc.) is not unlike the difference between transactional and solution-oriented selling: A customized cloud gives customers the advantages of a precise fit with their needs that public clouds don’t, including …

Adam Burke

What is Desktop as a Service?

I want to spend some blog space focusing on one of the most liberating of recent technology developments — a Cloud-based solution called Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS).

I say “liberating” because Desktop-as-a-Service offers a low-cost way of alleviating the onerous burdens of managing employees’ desktop devices — burdens that continue to get heavier as employees increasingly work from anywhere (a good thing, since it boosts productivity big time) and as they do this work on their own devices.

Tim Burke

Essentials to business disaster preparedness — #5: Test your plan and review it often

Business continuity plans aren’t worth a whole lot if they don’t work. And you cannot know whether or not they work unless you test them.

So that’s my fifth step toward business disaster preparedness: Test your plan — often.

Testing your plan frequently is essential. Change has a way of sneaking up on organizations, and those changes can disrupt your carefully laid plan to overcome disruptions. Fortunately, the right service provider will include regular testing in the price of your service.

Tim Burke

Essentials to business disaster preparedness — #4: Pinpoint the most cost-effective disruption recovery solutions

Okay, so your data is properly backed up, you’re monitoring its use, you’re developing a plan to protect your business and recover as quickly as possible from events beyond your control.

Now, in conjunction with your planning efforts, you need to pinpoint and then implement the most cost-effective disruption recovery solutions necessary to sustain business-critical operations when your systems and networks are down and/or when your office is unusable. This entails a three-step process that requires business continuity/disaster recovery expertise:

Tim Burke

Accelerating the technology solution conversation

Selling technology solutions means your outcomes will be more complex and will require greater technical reach and expertise.

Your focus shifts from dangling the lowest commodity prices before an ever-churning customer base to providing technology that’s so effective at improving business processes and solving business problems that your customers turn to you again and again. This brings you into deeper, longer-term relationships with your customers. And the customers you engage will typically be key decision-makers, such as CFOs and CEOs.

Adam Burke

Essentials to business disaster preparedness — #3: Make a business continuity plan

By definition, no event that interrupts your organization’s operations is trivial, so when it comes to preparing for disaster that might impact your business IT, you need a plan that addresses all emergencies that could disrupt your business. To create an effective plan, you’ll need to:

Tim Burke