'Managed Services' is the latest jargon floating around the Information Technology (IT) domain. A person working in the IT domain must be coming across this term frequently.

While searching for an answer to 'how much managed services cost,' you would come across various types of services offered and pricing models for the same. It can be an exhausting, confusing, and frustrating process. By the end of this article, you will be able to fathom nearly all the contributing cost factors, as well as understand the pricing models of Managed IT services. Before we look at how much 'Managed IT Services' cost, we need to understand what is meant by the term 'Managed Services' precisely. What is 'Managed IT services'? A range of various IT functions that are provided to a customer by a third-party IT specialist. These services provided by the third party provider/specialist is known as managed IT services, and the third party is known as a Managed Services Provider (MSP). In simple terms, Managed IT service provides IT related solution and maintains IT of the business. The cost of professional managed IT services In this field, the most important thing is the price factor; it will vary and usually depend on many determinants. It won't be wise to expect a fixed price from every managed IT service company out there. Even the same company will be charging a different price when different businesses or organizations are taken into consideration. However, everything is predictable if you follow the trail, a well-organized pattern of pricing and if you manage to work it out through your head, then you will be able to estimate an approximate price. Most of the times, the following factor determines the prices of a managed IT company.

• The company's efficiency in solving various tasks
• The area of your marketing campaign
• The competition that you are facing
• Skills of specialist and employees.

There are various pricing models followed by different Managed IT Service providers: 1. Traditional Approach a) Break-Fix model: The customer doesn't pay anything until something in inoperational, at which point their IT support company will fix it and charge them. 2. Modern Approach a) Per device: Per device is when you are charged per supported device. "Per device makes more sense in the hospitality space, especially when you involve rental hardware in the mix." - Chris Rumpf, Founder (Rumpf Computer Solutions) b) Per-user: It is similar to per device, but a flat fee is billed at the end of the month based on the number of users. This covers support for all devices used by each user, which could mean a smartphone, laptop, and office PC are all covered for one individual. "Per-user all the way. The devices are going away as more things move to the cloud. Getting paid per-device is a shrinking game." -Thomas Clancy, Jr., President (Valiant) c) Tiered: Which provides different package tiers that correspond to defined service levels. These tiers are structured, based on cost and resources, with a specific price point. d) Monitoring: A bare minimum approach to managed IT services. It provides network monitoring and alerting services, but solutions support could require extra fees. It can be sold in small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), as well as midsize and enterprise environments. e) Flat based range: This model is extremely flexible and includes all remote support. There is on-site support for an entire organization for a flat fee per month. f) A La Carte: A La Carte model offers flexibility and customization that creates an optimized solution for each client, but it is the most difficult to sell and the most difficult to sustain profitability. "I recommend bundling as much as possible. This keeps your offering simple for service delivery, billing, and marketing. While there's always a need to offer some a la carte options, I recommend keeping them to a minimum." -Dave Wilkeson, CEO (MSP Advisor) Primarily, as company size increases, the competition will grow, more significant will be the number of devices requiring these services, and the higher will be the cost of managed IT services.

“Reinvent new combinations of what you already own. Improvise. Become more creative. Not because you have to, but because you want to. Evolution is the secret for the next step.”

― Karl Lagerfeld

We have come a long way from what we have been. There was never a revolution, and there never will be, our life is part of a long evolution process. We evolve, we think, we build, we fail, and we succeed. Most importantly, in between, we learn.

Cloud computing has gone mainstream, swiftly earning a place among the key pillars of enterprise technology. We did not stop there; we started exploring further opportunities and looked for better business enterprise strategies, which led to ‘Multi-Cloud Strategy’. What is Multi-Cloud? When enterprises use more than one cloud platform which comprises of public, private, and hybrid clouds and each platform delivers a specific application service to achieve the end goals, the platform uses services in a single heterogeneous architecture known as ‘Multi-Cloud’, which is also known as a ‘Polynimbus’. Often, it is confused with the hybrid cloud. Hybrid cloud is an infrastructure while multi-cloud is a strategy. Multi-cloud strategy may use several different architectures, such as IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) and SaaS (Software as a Service) to achieve business goals. It aims to eliminate the reliance on any single cloud provider by using different providers to meet specific workload requirements. Why are enterprises adopting Multi-Cloud Strategy? Businesses distribute their resources between different cloud service providers to avoid latency and testing in an isolated environment. If one cloud is offline, then the enterprise may still work with other clouds and achieve their goals. It’s also customizable and flexible in the sense that an enterprise may “select the ‘best’ of each cloud type to suit their niche business needs, economics, locations, and timing.”  Another significant draw for a multi-cloud adoption is that enterprises can escape vendor lock-in as their data is stored on various service providers’ clouds. The Multi-Cloud Strategy offers security precautions that a single cloud deployment does not.  The well-known Shadow IT activities take place within an organization without their explicit approval. Multi-cloud will hinder these Shadow IT activities. Multi-Cloud Strategy also dodges the gravity of a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack as the attack won’t affect all the clouds within a multi-cloud, leaving the enterprise still functional despite the attack. Advantages of Multi-Cloud Strategy: 1. Cherry-picked services There is not a single cloud service provider who has the best tools for everything. You can choose the best services and tools from multiple cloud service providers, as per your requirement. 2. Improved disaster recovery There is not a single cloud service provider who has avoided a significant outage. By using two or more cloud service providers, you can make your infrastructure is more resilient, and you could keep replicas of your applications in multiple separate clouds so that, if one cloud goes down, you don’t. 3. Potential negotiating power Competition among major cloud service providers and being a high-volume customer may put you in a position to negotiate lower prices. You may be able to leverage your position by distributing your business amongst different providers. 4. Less single-vendor dependency It can be risky to depend on a single provider for multiple products and/or services. Power outages, decline in the quality of service and unexpected cost overrun are common variables that companies go through from time to time; and cloud providers are no exception to this. It is advisable to not put all your eggs in one basket and thus, minimize the risk on your business operations.   Disadvantages of Multi-Cloud Strategy: 1. Managing costs and loss of discounts If you have difficulty managing the cost for a single cloud service provider, you can imagine how much trouble you may have working with multiple providers. By distributing your resources and adding multiple providers, you may be losing discounts that you are entitled to. 2. Performance challenges Working with multiple cloud service providers may create challenges to assign the company’s resources to the right cloud service provider. For example, when a company is deploying their resources with a cloud service provider who may have many essential tools but not the ones that the company requires, it may result in poor performance for the company 3. Increased security risk Public cloud gives you less control over your data; moving to two public clouds gives you even less control. Besides, it creates a larger attack surface for your application. There are tools to secure multi-clouds that you may have to generally exercise a greater level of diligence in operating. 4. Multi-cloud management In a multi-cloud environment, managing cost is not the only thing you have to worry about. Managing all your data and resources on different platforms can be very complicated. Fortunately, there are some cloud management platforms with multi-cloud support. TechTarget conducted a survey among 260 enterprises, and the results showed that the majority of the enterprises use multi-cloud strategy. That means the advantages of it are far more valuable and disadvantages can be ignored or positively overthrown by a guided strategy. Multi-Cloud Strategy helps organizations to be less dependent on one service provider. You can replicate your resources and avoid unexpected breakdowns in the system. Your organization can also benefit from negotiating prices with service providers. Managing multi-cloud may seem like a challenge, however, if you leverage cloud management platforms efficiently, there is no need for panic.

Valentine’s Day is a great day to reflect on something we are grateful for and the things we love. Even though not all of may get to spend time with a special someone one or will be giving or receiving chocolates and roses, there are still many other things to love, including Cloud Computing. Cloud is always there for you: Like the ones we want in our lives, Cloud solutions are available 24/7*365 days, with several Cloud-enabled technologies offering guaranteed uptime in their Service Level Agreements. Cloud is what you want it to be: In comparison to certain on-premise technologies, the Cloud doesn’t burden the enterprise while transitioning costs to operations. This means organizations can spend less time in cost and more time in innovation. Cloud brings people closer: Employees usually collaborate on projects and over email discussions, leading to cluttered inboxes. With Cloud collaboration solutions and platforms, your team can now collaborate or work in real time and on the go. They give you choices: Cloud gives multiple options for organizations to be more flexible; one such option is the multi-Cloud strategy. Multi-Cloud implementation is when organizations have multiple Cloud services running in one architecture which helps them increase flexibility and innovation possibilities. They support your goals: Cloud is the perfect partner one could hope for. From collaboration, ease of access, to being extremely economical, it has impacted how other innovations are created and scaled with the adoption of DevOps. As operations increase in scale, some organizations are adopting Cloud-native PaaS platforms to accelerate development and achieve result-oriented goals faster. If you have strong feelings for trying out our Cloud services or if you want to find ideal solutions for your IT needs, feel free to contact us. We are not running any sale on our Cloud services because you can’t put a price tag on true love; however, we might be able to get you the BEST POSSIBLE DEAL!

For less than $20,000 in Bitcoins, any hacker can have access to some 617 million online account details stolen from 16 hacked websites.  Account records from this multi-gigabyte databases consist mainly of account holder names, email addresses, and passwords.

These passwords are hashed or encrypted and need to be cracked before they can be used. These databases, depending on the sites, consist of user information such as location, personal details, and social media authentication tokens. By far, there are no payment or bank card details published in the black-market sale listing.

Hijacked databases of the following websites can be purchased from the Dream Market cyber-souk, located in the Tor network:

• Dubsmash - 162 million accounts, MyFitnessPal - 151 million accounts, MyHeritage - 92 million accounts, ShareThis - 41 million accounts, HauteLook - 28 million accounts, Animoto - 25 million accounts, EyeEm - 22 million accounts, 8fit - 20 million accounts, Whitepages - 18 million accounts, Fotolog - 16 million accounts, 500px - 15 million accounts, Armor Games - 11 million accounts, BookMate - 8 million accounts, CoffeeMeetsBagel - 6 million accounts, Artsy - 1 million accounts, and DataCamp - 700,000 accounts.

The hacker claimed to have exploited the security vulnerabilities within web apps to gain remote-code execution to extract user account data. All of the databases are right now being promoted separately by a single hacker on the dark web, as per reports.

Read More: The Register