TierPoint: Overview, Solutions, Benefits & More

tierpoint

TierPoint provides managed services, colocation, cloud platform, network services, security and compliance, disaster recovery, and consulting services. The managed services include managed hosting, managed Office 365, OS management, application management, monitoring services, and helpdesk services. These are all designed to ensure maximum performance, availability, and business continuity.

Managed hosting provides users with convenience and complete peace of mind, while their application management services address the management of your most complex and vital applications and databases including Oracle, SQL, and MariaDB. TierPoint also offers end-to-end data recovery and backup as a service, and it actively tackles next-generation cyber threats.

The colocation services allow users to deploy their own hardware in the company’s high-tech facilities that provide enterprise-level performance, reliability, and security.

About TierPoint

TierPoint is a leading national provider of hybrid IT, helping organizations drive performance and manage risk. The company offers a comprehensive solution portfolio of private, multitenant, hyperscale, and hybrid cloud, plus colocation, disaster recovery, security, and other managed IT services.

With TierPoint’s Managed Services, customers can simplify and strengthen their IT infrastructure. By utilizing solutions ranging from security and business continuity to managed networks, TierPoint can assess a company’s current state and manage and customize agile solutions that address unique needs and budgets. Customers are given the opportunity to focus on their business by leveraging best-in-class technology, all while guided by TierPoint’s team of highly experienced IT professionals.

TierPoint stands apart as a managed services provider that remains accountable, innovative, and responsive – whatever their customers’ needs may be.

TierPoint’s Solutions

TierPoint helps accelerate transformation and achieve the business outcomes that will modernize and scale businesses to success. Whether users want to optimize cloud infrastructure, protect data before and after a cyberattack, or fill gaps in the IT team, TierPoint has the right solutions.

Optimize IT Spend

Budgets are rebounding after the pandemic and more money is flowing into new strategic IT initiatives. Now, businesses need to optimize and reevaluate cost models to ensure IT spending doesn’t get out of control. 

TierPoint evaluates cost models and stabilizes IT spending by optimizing technology choices and cost-controlling techniques.

Control Cloud Costs

As businesses adopt the cloud, the costs to run and maintain them can start to add up. TierPoint adds more cloud platforms to infrastructure so users can start experiencing cloud sprawl. Cloud sprawl is the uncontrolled growth of cloud instances and can contribute to escalating cloud costs. 

These costs can compound when businesses use expensive compute instances, fail to turn off unused resources, overprovision storage performance and capacity, and forget to account for data egress fees.

Cloud migration processes can also drive up costs. By understanding potential infrastructure issues and having the right team and skill sets in place early, you can better assess and control your cloud spend. You may even be able to cut costs.

For example, if one application is dependent on another, or a team member will be tied up in migration enough to pull them out of other projects, these factors need to be considered in the overall plan. TierPoing can help figure out how to reduce costs while setting migration priorities. 

Evaluate a Shift to “as-a-service” Models

One major way to control your IT costs is to take a closer look at cost models, capital expenditures (CapEx), and the alternatives.

CapEx spending is great for big purchases that companies will use frequently or for a long time. However, many businesses are rethinking their traditional models and moving towards “as a service” models, or an operating expenditure (OpEx) model. 

For example, if you don’t anticipate your system demands to fluctuate much, you may be safe making big investments in infrastructure. However, if you have seasonal surges, you’re looking to scale, or you’re looking for a way to get up and running without a lot of upfront expenses, you can benefit from an OpEx model, paying for what you need when you need it. 

With these alternatives, businesses are finding more flexibility, agility, and scalability options. When you pay as you go, you free up valuable resources that would otherwise be spent on managing onsite infrastructure. Other benefits would include predictable spending, lowering capital costs, and reducing spend on hardware and software.

New trends are also impacting why businesses are rethinking CapEx models.

According to the 2022 State of IT report, around 40% of IT departments expect to deal with the following: limited product availability, shipping delays or logistical problems, supply chain issues, increases in product costs, and chip shortages. Upgrading on-premises hardware is difficult due to component shortages and the wait times for those components can reach up to years.

Reduce the Cost of Staffing In-house IT Talent

As of 2021, there are 2.7 million unfilled cybersecurity jobs, a reduction from 3.1 million in 2020. However, the pipeline has a long way to go to close the gap. It can be hard to secure top talent with every organization vying for qualified individuals. 

Instead of wrestling with the talent shortage, working with a service provider can give you access to several different specialists when you need them. TierPoint helps you have a deeper bench without paying for multiple full-time staff members.

Reduce Your Footprint with the Cloud or Off-premises Data Centers

Cloud data centers are becoming more prevalent, processing 94% of workloads in 2021. Businesses building their own data centers need to think about initial investment, ongoing costs, and the staffing and skills needed for operation. 

A move to cloud resources takes you out of the data center business. It also frees up your team to be involved in more revenue-building activities relevant to your organization. Cloud services can help you be more nimble with your business processes while enjoying cost savings on upfront expenses. 

Data center relocation, whether it’s from another provider or from your corporate data center to a third-party facility, involves a lot of moving parts and can be expensive. Colocation can help you save money where you’ve already made an investment.

Business Continuity

Maximize system uptime and minimize data loss in the event of a disruption by enabling infrastructure resilience. TierPoint’s business continuity consulting services help develop or update the business continuity plan (BCP). This ensures it covers risks to your growing business and IT environment.

Ensure Business Continuity and Minimize Downtime

Business continuity consulting services can help minimize unplanned downtime that can make the difference between a productive day and a huge productivity loss. A major disruption could result in a long-term hit to your revenue or reputation.

Reducing downtime is essential to maintaining trust and keeping business operations running smoothly. Being prepared for potential disasters is the first step on the road to recovery, and starting your plan with a consideration of who and what needs to be in place to get back to business is imperative.

Confidently Address Risks and Implement Resiliency Strategies

When in crisis, you need to have confidence that the plan will work without a hitch. Business continuity consulting will help you define a plan that allows you to immediately respond to a crisis. All with the confidence that critical business activities can be restored quickly.

The right plan will also help you meet your recovery point objectives (RPO), recovery time objectives (RTO), and compliance objectives.

Augment Your Teams with Recovery Expertise

Give your team the support they deserve. TierPoint’s business continuity consulting experts serve as an extension and partner to your team, helping you build robust business continuity strategies and plans. It can also help you test the plan to ensure it’s ready.

Protect My Data

As attacks grow more frequent and sophisticated, businesses can no longer simply react to cybersecurity events. Organizations need to embrace continuous improvements when it comes to protecting their data, applications, and systems.

With TierPoint, they can take a proactive approach to cybersecurity to protect business-critical applications and data.

Fortify Your Organization Against Ransomware

Ransomware and cyberattacks continue to ripple out, with bigger price tags and greater frequency. In the last year, ransomware cases and extortion demands increased by 400%.

Businesses have to take proactive steps to fight ransomware and data breaches. They can do this by educating their employees and improving the cybersecurity strategy protecting their organization. As threats continue to increase, it is imperative that organizations create a security strategy that offers modern authentication methods, monitoring, and awareness training.

TierPoint’s cybersecurity protections can range from network security to penetration testing to threat intelligence and incident response. Managed Security Providers can help develop that strategy and find the best data protection and overall security tools.

Maintain Compliance with Regulatory Requirements and Data Privacy Laws

Every industry has different regulatory requirements. These requirements are set up to protect personally identifiable information (PII) from being accessed by the wrong people.

Depending on the regulations that govern your industry, you may be expected to maintain strict requirements. If you don’t, your business may suffer fines when you fail to protect user data properly. 

Compliance is a key part of any cybersecurity strategy. It’s important to work with a partner that understands how to address certain regulatory requirements.

Secure Your Remote Workforce

Telecommuting is moving into the mainstream. Since the pandemic, many employees have moved out of the office and are increasingly working remotely. While some of those remote work arrangements may be temporary, the overall trend shows they will likely continue for the foreseeable future. 

Businesses need to update their cybersecurity strategies to account for this shift. Remote employees can serve as a huge vulnerability in an otherwise secure infrastructure, and the right cybersecurity tools can help harden the defenses of remote employees. Tools like anti-malware, VPN, encryption, MDA, and more.

They can keep important data safe and monitor networks for suspicious activity. These tools and security strategies also serve as a powerful first step toward better protecting your business.

Improve Performance

With an ever-changing IT landscape, digital transformation initiatives need to create great customer experiences. The right touchpoints can create a competitive advantage for businesses as they strive to better support their internal users and customers. Better-performing systems and applications are at the heart of a strong customer experience. 

TierPoint helps leverage new technologies to reimagine and optimize customer and user experiences.

Understand the Business Implications of Technology

IT teams today need to embrace user- and customer-centricity, create integrated experiences, and consider a design-first way of thinking. Technology should always support business goals while paving the way forward. 

Neglecting these approaches and technological advancements can result in negative outcomes for the business. 

Cloud platforms can help streamline and improve those scenarios. With cloud platforms and tools, businesses can deploy new digital customer experiences faster. This means your product can be in the market in days rather than months.

Leveraging the cloud can also deliver additional business value, like meeting evolving customer expectations and improving the customer experience (with speed and reliability). 

Embrace Change

Your systems should have the ability to scale and be agile. Businesses may see spikes throughout the year when customers use a digital product more. For instance, many businesses see spikes in digital traffic during the Black Friday shopping season. How do businesses manage that increased customer engagement with their products during these spikes?

What happens when the spike is over? Does your solution have the ability to scale back down to normal levels (to prevent spending more than you need to)?

Don’t let your IT user experience be hindered by an inability to scale. System or application performance isn’t enough. You need to be able to scale the experience as you grow. 

Scaling with the cloud, especially the public cloud is an easy way to support your business processes as you grow. TierPoing gives you the ability to deploy resources efficiently and quickly. The public cloud is particularly good for big data, eCommerce, media and collaboration, and specialty workloads.

Adapt to Support WFH

According to Gallup, 53% of hybrid workers plan to continue to work in a hybrid work environment beyond 2022.

Enabling a work-from-home environment is an adaptation most businesses have made or will need to make in the near future. As our working world becomes more remote, organizations need to focus on connecting coworkers, partners, and clients from any device. 

TierPoint’s services such as Managed Office 365 can help businesses make calls, chat, collaborate, and share files. It can also make calls in and outside of organizations, work on Office files, and take advantage of cloud storage. 

Ease of use and security can both be top of mind with productivity tools, virtual tools, and network solutions that help get the job done. 

Close IT Skills Gaps

Weathering workforce shortages, retaining current staff, and managing a partially or fully remote workforce is a lot to juggle. Not to mention grappling with the day-to-day tasks that can bog down any IT team. Every day spent managing minutiae is a day taken away from innovating as an organization. 

TierPoint helps scale your team’s capabilities and bandwidth with access to cloud expertise.

Fill IT Skills Gap

Like most industries, the IT field has faced workforce shortages and fierce competition that makes it increasingly difficult to find and keep in-house talent that has the capabilities to support future initiatives. One option is moving full steam toward an outsourcing model, however, there might be a middle ground. 

Many businesses are instead turning to managed services providers to fill in specific skills gaps that they cannot find (or afford) in the current talent pool. This allows the business to retain their key IT team members for IT projects, while off-loading certain responsibilities, mostly day-to-day tasks, to those managed services providers.

Working with a provider like TierPoint means you can reap the benefits of multiple skilled individuals without having to find a large number of full-time employees. Plus, it might be more cost-effective and save time that would otherwise be spent on recruiting and onboarding. 

Find a Way to Free Your Team from Day-to-day Tasks

As IT becomes a more strategic function, technology becomes a major driver of business outcomes. Getting rid of the day-to-day allows your team to be a driver of change. Working with a managed services provider like TierPoint lets you refocus your team on revenue-generating projects that will achieve your business goals. 

A managed services provider allows you to offload some of your day-to-day necessities, giving your in-house staff the space they need to come up with innovative, revenue-building ideas for your company. Providers can often assist with areas, like

  • Database Management (SQL, MySQL, etc.)
  • Application Management (SAP, Microsoft 365, etc)
  • OS Management (Windows, Linux, and Unix)

Businesses might also look to providers to manage even more, like their cloud infrastructure. With managed cloud providers, you can also modernize and optimize your entire IT infrastructure. 

Adapt to a Remote-Work-Centric World

Remote workforces have been growing in popularity over the last couple of years, and the move has transformed from a temporary solution to a permanent trend. As businesses continue their move to remote teams, managed services providers can be more in demand to help with managing IT infrastructure at an onsite data center. 

TierPoint can also fulfill help desk duties when employees need IT assistance. Your team is meant for more than troubleshooting issues on a coworker’s laptop. Put their talent to the best use possible. 

Modernize IT

Reexamine and refresh aging hardware to modernize and optimize your IT infrastructure.

Overcome Technical Debt and End-of-life Hardware Challenges

Older, outdated hardware increases costs and technical risk, while also limiting agility. Organizations that hold off on refreshing that hardware are prone to experiencing these downsides.

To overcome this, businesses need to assess their systems, understand the lifecycle plan for their equipment, and evaluate modern alternatives, like the cloud. 

A secure and modern data center is a requirement for businesses looking for cloud-based infrastructure support. TierPoint can offer the connectivity and infrastructure to move your cloud journey forward, without having to worry about the day-to-day. 

Adapt to the Remote Work Pivot

Propelled by the COVID-19 pandemic, businesses have needed to rapidly adapt to changing work environments. Ushering in more remote workers than ever before. Organizations need to strongly reevaluate all technologies to support this new way of working including laptops, conferencing software, productivity and collaboration suites, and security for personal devices. 

Many organizations have embraced cloud-based software for increased collaboration.  Managed Microsoft 365 allows employees to access their work from any device. A virtual private network (VPN) can allow those employees to work securely. 

Embrace Hybrid IT to Improve the Customer Experience

Whether you’re looking to join disparate systems due to a merger or acquisition, or you’ve just experienced system creep over time, a hybrid IT environment can help you move towards consolidation through a mix of cloud and non-cloud services. 

No matter the situation, innovating by hybrid cloud adoption can help improve the longevity of your organization. This ensures that your systems, and your business, will be around for years to come. 

Develop a Plan to Move Off-premises

Even if your team can handle a move to an off-premises environment, it doesn’t mean that it’s always a good use of their time. You still need to have staff on hand to keep things running. 

Identify what your team can and can’t do, and bring in outside help to fill in the gaps. This can come in handy when you’re developing a plan and executing a cloud migration.

Cloud-Enhanced Innovation

Digital transformation projects have become a necessity for all businesses. Cloud-enhanced digital transformation can go beyond modernization; it can help you foster innovation, improve customer experience, and forge your way into the digital future. 

TierPoint helps you use the cloud for more. Leverage advanced cloud strategies to drive business innovation.

Innovating to Grow Your Digital Business

The pandemic helped advance a more digital world. Technology solutions have been pushed to the forefront and IT is now becoming more of a strategic function to deliver business value. The more time your IT team can focus on revenue-generating activities, the better. Give your team the time they need to help you gain an advantage over your competitors and improve your customer experience. 

Businesses need to adopt TierPoint to help them become that strategic partner. This means: 

  • Becoming more agile with the cloud 
  • Pushing for a more cloud-native design and deployment
  • Leveraging automation to manage certain management
  • Using AI and Machine learning to augment your human team members.

Get the Most Out of Your Data and Make Data-driven Decisions

Big data creates big opportunities. Big data analytics helps businesses figure out what to do with all that data. When data is coming in from all sides, it can be a struggle to identify what to look at. Valuable insights produced in real-time can help you accelerate business success. 

By identifying the data points that are most useful, organizations can: 

  • Make data-driven decisions more quickly 
  • Have confidence that you are growing and changing in the right direction 

Optimize Your Cloud Planning

When thinking about cloud optimization, organizations need to consider which resources should be allocated to which workloads. When resources are right-sized and selected properly, costs and waste go down and performance goes up. 

Sometimes it can be hard to see opportunities for optimization when you’re too close to the project, or when a team is stretched too thin. Cloud-based solutions like TierPoint can help you gain the insight you need to improve efficiency.

Benefits of Using TierPoint

TierPoint takes a platform-agnostic approach to helping clients achieve their most pressing business objectives. It draws on a comprehensive portfolio of services, from public to private to multitenant cloud, from colocation to disaster recovery, security, and more.

Security First: The platform builds its solutions around security, rather than the other way around. Architects and engineers use a proactive, security-first approach that helps ensure data is secure by design.

Customer Satisfaction: TierPoint averages a 9.5 out of 10 for overall satisfaction in customer surveys. Starting from the first conversation when it learns about business outcomes, its sales and service delivery teams work together to ensure transitions, builds, and continued growth of IT infrastructure aligns with digital transformation strategies.

Cloud Neutral: Your path to the cloud is unique to your business. TierPoint’s certified cloud architects offer unbiased advice on how you can achieve an optimal migration to the cloud. Whether it’s private cloud, multitenant, or public cloud, it helps determine the most successful roadmap to the cloud for your business.

Cloud: Digital transformation is accelerated by the cloud. TierPoint is a hybrid shop offering managed public and private clouds, along with multitenant cloud and cloud connectivity options throughout its expansive data center portfolio.

Recovery: Minimizing downtime and data loss is paramount to any business, and it starts with a plan. TierPoint can help build a disaster recovery plan and can enable it with its resiliency product lineup. This includes its analyst-recognized, industry-leading DRaaS offerings.

Colocation: Save on building and staffing costs and operate your IT equipment in one of TierPoint’s secure, state-of-the-art, geographically convenient data centers. Edge-capable data centers are connected to the world through leading carriers, content providers, and hyperscalers.

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