Why Does Your Business Need IT Consulting Services?

IT departments or on-site IT professionals have become increasingly significant for many types of organizations- small and large, today. As the COVID-19 pandemic has changed the way people work, giving rise to alternative workplace strategies, businesses are forced to rethink IT technology and strategy to keep up with the ‘new normal’. Companies, therefore, expect their IT budgets to grow. 

So what’s IT consulting in simple terms?

Gartner defines IT consulting as “advisory services that help clients assess different technology strategies and in doing so, align their technology strategies with their business or process strategies.” 

IT consultants are needed for software implementations, training, and maintenance. Some companies try to do these activities on their own. Many have succeeded in getting their software up and running to what they think is “Best Practices” for their company. However, with a technology consulting company like Fingent, you’ll rest assured that you’re dealing with someone who knows the product end-to-end. You’ll get to collaborate with an expert who knows how to look for alternatives or add-on solutions for that product. Thus, you end up streamlining the entire process of conversion, training, and implementation with an IT consultant.

Read more: Software Development Outsourcing –  Why software development outsourcing is a smart move now?

Why should you hire IT consultants?

1. Flexible staff:  Most IT consultants offer their services on a contract basis. Organizations may need to supplement their team for a holiday season; they may be rolling out new software or merging companies. There are a lot of situations where a company needs a lot more people for a small amount of time. They don’t have to hire full-time salaried people and then lay them off. Consultants can come in for a short time and do the job for them. 

2. Proven expertise: Your organization may be the best in your LOB. But you may not have the required know-how in house, to implement the best IT solution for your business. Well-experienced IT consultants can advise the best modus operandi to ensure that your new IT project runs smoothly. A reputable IT consultancy would also bring in the shared knowledge of its many business partners. So, you’ll be at the receiving end of the latest trends and updates of the IT industry.

3. Outsider perspective: You are a part of your company. So, you may not spot the blunders that an outsider can quickly point out. Since IT consultants have already worked on similar projects before, they can quickly identify what would work and what would not. They can also bring in different schemes that can help improve ROI that may not have been visible to you.

4. Train employees: Employees are an asset to your company. So you have to provide them with the necessary training facilities to develop their skills and keep them engaged. IT consultants are always at the top of their game, making them good trainers. Suppose you have implemented a new ERP system. After understanding the needs of your company, IT consultants can provide customized training programs to your staff and equip them towards a smooth transition. 

Read more: Digital Transformation Consulting Services – How digital transformation solutions redefine businesses with effective digital experiences

Business benefits of hiring IT consultants

1. Reduced Costs: Hiring in-house staff solely for your IT technical needs or training your existing employees are other options that you can consider instead of hiring IT consultants. While hiring new employees, you’ll have to include the added costs along with their salaries, including taxes, benefits, and overhead expenses. On the other hand, for training existing employees, you’ll have to shell out on a trainer and the skill acquired may not even be used in the future.  Hiring IT consultants will help reduce downtime. Often, you bring in consultants to address a specific issue for a short period. Therefore, they prove to be more budget-friendly. 

2. Better Security: Cyberattacks continue to derail large and small businesses alike. Consultants who specialize in IT security can help tackle and prevent these risks. After analyzing the risk points in your system, IT security consultants can advise on the best security practices that would suit your company. IT consultants can help prevent possible risks by implementing regular updates on your software, training employees to identify malware, developing appropriate disaster recovery solutions, and so on.

3. Focus on core business: SMEs generally fall into the trap of trying to save money by doing everything themselves. The companies whose core competencies lie in non-IT related industries have observed that finding solutions for IT problems zaps them of their time and energy. Not to mention the rise in frustration levels of your workforce as they spend hours doing what they’re not good at in the first place. Once you outsource your IT needs to a specialist, you’ll see speedy execution with higher efficiency in completing the project. Thus, investing in an IT consultancy will lead to better ROI.  

4. Increased productivity and efficiency: IT consulting experts can help businesses optimize their systems. They can help homogenize your IT infrastructure according to the industry best practices. The resultant consistency can help streamline processes, create resilience, and reduce costs related to IT support. Next, as mentioned earlier, IT consultants help manage tasks like software updates, data, and network security that would otherwise be monotonous for your employees, enabling them to focus on increasing profits. Many enterprises are moving to the cloud to reduce their infrastructure costs associated with outdated physical servers. An IT consulting partner can help you realize the full benefits of the cloud by integrating all existing systems, making a smooth transition securely, and avoiding common mistakes.

Read more: Digital Innovation – 10 Services Offered by Fingent to Prepare Your Business for the Future of Digital Innovation

As technology grows by leaps and bounds, organizations have to find ways to grow along with the growth in business. The right IT consulting firm can help you use technology as a tool to increase productivity and reduce unwanted expenses. Need help to manage your IT needs? Fingent’s round-the-clock and customer-centric IT consulting services are bound to give you a competitive edge. We’re just a phone call away! Contact us now! 

Transform Your Business IT Infrastructure With Kubernetes

Today’s competitive world requires businesses to come out with applications that offer unified customer experience along with premium quality. In this scenario, every enterprise CIO is concerned about their IT infrastructure that needs to support such high-quality applications that are sophisticated in terms of capacity, customization, scalability, security, and cost factors. This is where Kubernetes, the open-source container orchestration platform has evolved as a de facto standard in enhancing the IT infrastructure of enterprises to achieve their business goals with positive outcomes. 

What Is Kubernetes?

Kubernetes can be explained as a workload distribution and orchestration method for servers that are clustered in a data center. It ensures the availability and accessibility of resources as well as offers a balanced execution for multiple servers involved simultaneously. 

Being a mechanism of distributed data processing, Kubernetes can enable any number of servers of various kinds at the same time, which can be located at any distance, to share workloads for a common client. These workloads are then presented to clients as services. Through this mechanism, Kubernetes enables the client system to access services via the network, pass data, and collect responses from the network as well.

Why Use Kubernetes?

Many data points reveal rapid Kubernetes adoption for their IT infrastructure benefits. Google-created Kubernetes is now part of the CNCF (Cloud Native Computing Foundation) and can be run on-premises or within the public cloud. 

Kubernetes deploys applications cost-effectively as it consumes less IT manpower for application management. Additionally, Kubernetes makes applications more portable so that they can be moved easily between various clouds as well as internal environments.

Related Reading: Cloud Service Models Saas, IaaS, Paas – Choose the Right One for Your Business

How Kubernetes Can Benefit Your IT Infrastructure

Kubernetes is a system that can be used to deploy applications efficiently. As a result, it can help enterprises save money by using less manpower to manage their IT infrastructure. 

Kubernetes effectively automates the management of containers. As containers allow pieces of code to be assembled into smaller and easily portable pieces, and larger applications involve a bundle of several containers, Kubernetes can organize multiple containers into units. Thus containerized applications can be scaled in an automated manner, making it more feasible with only lesser resources required to manage multiple containers. 

Kubernetes offers these capabilities to your business:

• Multi-cloud flexibility –  As more enterprises are running on multi-cloud platforms, they benefit from Kubernetes as it easily runs any application on any public cloud service or a combination of public and private clouds.  It is a great way to avoid vendor lock-in and allows you to assign the right workloads to the right cloud. 
• Faster time to market – As Kubernetes can help your development team to break down into smaller units to focus on single, specific, and smaller microservices, these smaller teams tend to be more agile. Additionally, APIs between these microservices can be a huge benefit to your IT infrastructure by significantly reducing the amount of cross-communication between the teams. Thus, Kubernetes manages large applications across multiple containers efficiently and also handles service discovery by allowing containers to communicate with each other. It also provides access to storage from different vendors such as Azure and AWS.
• IT cost optimization – Kubernetes provides a feasible container-based architecture which makes scaling of applications much simpler, using the cloud and hardware investments of your enterprise. This automated scaling of applications to meet business needs without over-provisioning your infrastructure will free up your resources and lead to the optimization of IT costs. 
• Improved scalability and availability – Performance and scalability are two critical factors that make an application successful. Kubernetes serves as a critical management system that can scale up the application as well as its infrastructure whenever the workload increases, and scale it down as the load subsides. This auto-scaling capability of Kubernetes can handle any kind of metrics, be it resource utilization metrics or custom metrics. 
• Effective migration to the cloud – Kubernetes can handle rehosting, re-platforming, as well as refactoring. It offers a seamless path to port your application from on-premise to cloud effectively. 

Related Reading: 5 Trends That Will Transform Cloud Computing in 2020

 Kubernetes offers a simpler way of managing containers effectively. It not only reduces your business cost but also provides value to your customers. 

Drop a call to us right away if you are looking out for options to reduce complexity and costs related to your IT infrastructure. Our experts will guide you on a feasible and agile way to structure your IT infrastructure for positive outcomes.