Introducing Managed Cloud Hosting Monthly Executive Summary Reports
As a leading managed cloud hosting provider we charge our clients a small fee each month (about the cost of a Latte a day) to take over the day to day management of their servers. With this management we handle a number of tasks for our clients that they are either unable to handle themselves or that they recognize may not be the best use of their employee’s time. These include such tasks as:
- Ensuring their servers are protected from malware and secured. Like handling the antivirus updates and reviewing any alerts that come up and addressing them promptly.
- Ensuring their servers are operating at maximum performance and aren’t causing any sort of bottlenecks for their applications.
- Handling updates and security patches and making sure they’re constantly up to date.
- Running backup and verifying that the backup jobs ran on a nightly basis.
- Monitoring critical resources and services and ensuring that if they have an issue it’s addressed.
And that’s only the tip of the iceberg really but it demonstrates the type of tasks that our clients hand off. One of our missions as a company is to be very good at the above, in fact so good that if our clients have an issue they are likely to never know it happened because we addressed it for them before it impacted their business. I’m happy to say we’re pretty successful at that mission but there’s a problem. It’s like the philosophical saying “If a tree falls in the woods and nobody is there to hear it, does it make a sound?” Well I ask you “If your managed cloud server has an issue and your cloud hosting engineers are fast enough to resolve it that nobody noticed it, did it happen?”.
It’s really about accountability. You see with managed hosting (and today it seems like every hosting offer is managed hosting .. even the $24.95/month ones) the question is what’s managed and are they really managing it? Who’s holding them accountable? I’m pleased to say at Applied Innovations our managed windows cloud servers are managed, we do strive to be just that good and we’re held accountable by our Advanced Monitoring Platform (AMP).
Introducing your Executive Report
What is displayed below is what we’ve coined “An Executive Report” it’s generated on a monthly basis for all of our managed hosting customers and shows them the Key Performance Indices (KPIs) that they are likely most interested in when they wonder how healthy their servers are and just exactly what we’re doing for them and how we’re doing in meeting our goals.
Let’s take a look together
- The Health Score – This gives you an overall score of this client’s environment for the month of July. We scored only a 93.3% across key management areas monitored. unfortunately. But then we break this down into various sub areas and you can see the server had 100% uptime, 100% patch management, no failed login attacks but the Antivirus was only active on one of their three servers (This is actually by request on this particular environment)
- Managed Devices – Here we show they have 3 devices and what core checks where and how they did. You’ll see they had some Disk/File performance issues throughout the month. This actually threw up a red flag for this customer and they realized their needs for disk space had increased and they needed to add additional diskspace for their servers to help with overall application performance.
- Alerts Resolved – These are the trees falling in the forest. The fact is until we brought this up to the client he never realized he had any issues whatsoever and assumed the server was just chugging along and we were just sitting back letting it run. Fact is they had 19 different issues that month and we addressed them all for them and the client never realized it.
- Protection Effectiveness – Here we show which servers have antivirus and which servers had patch management and how many patches were needed and installed in that month. The client had 1 server with antivirus installed (and it remained up to date and without issue all month) and they have 3 servers with patch management enabled and we identified they needed 14 patches and we installed those 14 patches for them in the month of July.
- Coverage – Lastly we just show a summary of the server report and how we did last month.
So that’s the Executive Report. It’s our way of demonstrating that we’re meeting our goals, that your servers are performing as they should and holding ourselves accountable to delivering managed cloud hosting services to our clients.
So if you’re still having that kind of conversation or if you’re concerned your hosting provider isn’t delivering on their promises, I encourage you to speak with one of our account reps and we’ll be happy to help you migrate to a managed cloud hosting environment with Applied Innovations. Oh and if you’re wondering if there’s a more detailed report (spoiler alert: There is!).
