Nowadays, several new challenges are arising due to the constant developments in technologies which are imposing on IT managers to change their long-held strategies and operations in order to adopt new methods allowing them to reach their goals. This is the case in different IT segments, and the hardware maintenance field is witnessing in particular this shift to new methods. Therefore, IT managers find themselves more and more often in a situation where the usual OEM extended warranty models can no longer be considered as convenient options due to financial or operational reasons, and this makes third-party hardware maintenance plans an essential part of operations.
Establishing a partnership providing dedicated maintenance and support will allow IT managers to follow a variety of technological trends, but in particular three trends stand out:
1. Cloud computing
The technology of cloud computing is a method which enables IT teams to move hardware out of the internal data center and reduce their daily management responsibility. As a result, financial plans will also be changed, and many companies invest larger funds into the cloud instead of internal data centers. This situation causes major issues for IT managers since many of the data sets and applications that cannot be moved to the cloud exist on legacy hardware. In the majority of cases, such issue occurs for one of two reasons – the legacy applications are critical, but they cannot be translated into a virtual environment, or the storage systems provide a single functionality, such as built-in redundancy, making them too valuable to replace with cloud solutions.
In such case, IT managers will still have several legacy hardware requiring support, but less funds for maintenance plans. Third-party hardware maintenance vendors can offer services for costs that are much lower than the OEMs, and therefore reduce the financial challenges resulting from managing legacy systems in a cloudified IT world.
2. Big data
The big data analytics movement is a key trend across various business sectors. This means for IT managers, finding solutions for the major storage challenges. The necessity to balance high-performance systems for active data and high-capacity ranges of archived information is very important in this matter. Many companies do not dispose of the necessary financial resources to invest into new systems in both of these areas, but big data requirements make it extremely difficult to skimp on either. A possible solution would be to use legacy storage systems to support archiving and purchase new ranges to satisfy the ongoing performance requirements.
Such option can decrease the budgets of big data plans without forcing organizations to compromise on quality. For a similar setup, hardware maintenance partnerships can appear to be invaluable in ensuring dependability for the legacy systems used to archive data.
3. Green IT
Currently, sustainability is becoming a primary concern for IT leaders. In fact, waste resulting from power and electronics are increasing exponentially with the development of technology. Therefore, Green IT strategies have become a priority for companies in order to face this problem in just about every sector. Waste management is a particularly challenging issue because IT equipment, such as computers, servers, storages and network components can include a combination of hazardous chemicals and materials requiring particular disposal methods and precious metals that necessitate recycling.
The option of having a third-party hardware maintenance plan can allow IT managers to deal with waste in a more effective way using supplementary services that support equipment disposal. This is important in particular, for storage systems since companies should not only take into consideration environmental factors when searching for solutions, they must also establish strategies for data protection to make sure information is inaccessible when hard disks are disposed. Many hardware maintenance providers offer specialized services in this area, making them a valuable asset for IT leaders concerned with sustainability.
