Why hosting? The benefits of hosting your CMMS with Siveco

An increasing number of Siveco customers choose to outsource the hosting of their solutions, instead of investing in their own servers and hiring the IT resources required to maintain them. This is true not only of smaller companies without a strong IT department, but also of larger corporations with very well-established in-house IT team.

A few years ago, hosting was already a hot topic, but it was seldom implemented in practice: fears related to data security, system and data ownership, and so on, were prevalent. Since 2012, feelings towards hosting appear to have changed significantly. Few customers even question security and ownership issues, these are considered a given in the internet world, where everyone already relies in one way or another on servers located somewhere, anywhere, in the clouds.

Our first customers all wanted to host the system on their own servers, which often resulted in high costs and subpar reliability… The truth is that the IT aspects of a project, easily discounted when everything runs smoothly, present major headaches when things go wrong… The Siveco support team recalls countless examples of disastrous disk crashes, inexplicable network slowdowns, irrecoverable backup (“we did not know we were supposed to do back-up”). Troubleshooting such problems usually involve collaboration between several parties – hardware suppliers, IT suppliers, Siveco, internal IT department, end-users etc. In practice few customers can manage this process efficiently.

Nowadays most customers welcome a hosted or cloud-based approach. This article provides an overview of Siveco China’s offering for hosting and technical support services, with a focus on the complete cloud offering.

Of course, Siveco doesn’t own or operate its own data centers. Instead, we rely on the infrastructure of giant partners such as Aliyun (AliCloud), a subsidiary of Chinese internet giant Alibaba Group, providing large-scale distributed computing systems to the industry and Ecritel, a global provider of cloud computing, with its subsidiary in China providing specialist services for clients with more demanding needs.

Our cloud servers feature self-service management, data security, advanced features such as automatic recovery and preventing network attacks. They are designed to help streamline development and deployment process, reducing operation and maintenance costs, build on-demand extension of site structure, so as to adapt to the fast-changing Internet application features.

Servers are located in mainland China, which is ideal for access within China, but less optimized for access outside of China due to the current limitations in China’s international internet Infrastructure (for clients in other countries, we can provide hosting services from Siveco Hongkong). The cloud servers are optimized either for bluebee^® cloud (large multisite and mobile users) or Coswin (plant users)

In all case, the Siveco support team remains the customer only point of contact.

Siveco provides full operation services for customers’ Mission-Critical Servers (i.e. our servers run systems supporting our customer’s daily operation).

All activities related to ensuring the reliable operation of the cloud servers are undertaken by Siveco, which includes the maintenance of the server in terms of:

• Server hardware, internet connection (server-side), operating system, database and application server
• Monitoring
• Backup

The Siveco applications – bluebee^® cloud, bluebee^® and Coswin – themselves (bug fixes, upgrades, users support) are maintained under the Siveco Enhanced Support Contract, which also covers utilization audits (see this previous article for details).

This approach is totally transparent to end-users, who will simply use an internet-based system. No IT support is required from customers, with the exception of ensuring that end-users computers and mobile devices have correct access to the internet. No administrative access to the server will be given to the client, as none is needed.

All support calls to Siveco, for all Siveco contracts, will be conducted through the unique Siveco contact point, i.e. the Siveco China national hotline (free number) 4006-300-213 and email support@sivecochina.com.

• 24/7 automated monitoring of server
• 24/7 service for server recovery and other server-related emergencies
• Hotline support opening hours follows the conditions of the main Siveco support contract (either office hours 9:00-18:00, extended office hours until 23:00, or 24/7)

In the absence of major natural disasters or other acts of God, a 99.999% server availability is guaranteed for cloud servers. In case of hardware failure, the system is automatically migrated to different physical servers while retaining the same IP address, ensuring minimal downtime and users’ impact.

The use of large-scale distributed computing systems, with multiple copies of data, ensures that damage can be recovered quickly. Data backups are performed daily and 7 days of backups are retained.

The firewall is designed to prevent ARP attacks, MAC spoofing, to provide effective protection against DDoS attacks, to scan for port intrusion, Trojan horses and other vulnerabilities. The latest anti-virus technologies are implemented on all servers.

The data center benefits from multi-line connections to both China Telecom and China Unicom networks, ensuring high-speed for users throughout the country. Dedicated bandwidth effectively solves the bandwidth bottleneck, unlike traditional bandwidth sharing.

For cloud servers, server configuration can be changed elastically, directly online by Siveco personnel, to adapt to future capacity needs (data storage, sites and users). Such extension is done without system downtime.

All system data remains the exclusive property of customers and can be exported at any time by authorized end-users in Excel format using bluebee^® cloud or Coswin built-in functionality or by Siveco upon termination of the hosting contract (no fee applies for this service). In addition, the application software itself can be migrated to other servers (other hosting company or in-house data center) if customers wish to (installation fees apply).

All Siveco solutions can be hosted: bluebee^® cloud, bluebee^® and Coswin 8i.

Experience shows that the direct cost of properly operating a CMMS server, including reliable backup, is much higher than most people expect.

In terms of direct costs, when hosting your CMMS with Siveco:

- No hardware investment (server, backup system, UPS, server rack, etc.)
- No server software investment (legally licensed OS, backup software, server monitoring software, etc.)
- No cost for additional internet bandwidth, very costly in China
- No IT personnel cost (IT resources is not free: salaries, welfare, overhead, turnover, etc… in large companies, the IT department may also charge a high hourly rate to business units).
- No inefficiencies due to multiple points of contacts and “blame game” between data center, IT team, hosting service company, software supplier, end-users etc.

In terms of indirect costs, when hosting with Siveco:

- No losses due to server downtime (reliability is guaranteed, with multiple redundancies)
- No losses due to poor bandwidth (guaranteed)
- No hidden problem (server and applications are automatically monitored 24/7)
- No losses due to faulty back-up (an extremely common problem, often with catastrophic consequences)
- No downtime when upgrading or expanding the infrastructure

All in all, hosting by Siveco is usually cheaper than other alternatives (in-house hosting or third-party hosting). Contact us for a quote!

Tags： hosting