What Is Hardware As A Service, And What Advantages Does It Offer?
Old, ineffective, and problem-prone hardware isn’t just frustrating, it’s expensive — either to repair or replace, with the greatest cost being lost productivity. Did you know you can totally offload your hardware management and capital expenses by switching to Hardware as a Service?
How many of your workstations or other pieces of equipment are out of date and due to be refreshed?
If we’re being honest, it’s likely you have a couple of old pieces that could be replaced — but you haven’t replaced them, and you may not be planning to, right? Doing so means paying upfront in capital. It’s a lot to spend at once, and is often too much for some, depending on your budget.
What if you could eliminate the cycle altogether?
Instead of having to invest in new hardware by paying all at once, and seeing the ROI over the course of its life, what if you could budget for hardware in a “pay-as-you-go” fashion?
We’ve got good news for you — you can. It’s called Hardware as a Service (HaaS)
What Is Hardware as a Service?
HaaS is a service provision model for equipment. In simple terms, it’s similar to licensing or leasing.
Instead of having to purchase your equipment outright, you get your IT company to install the equipment for you, and you rent it from them on an ongoing basis. Each party will enter into a service level agreement (SLA) which defines each party’s responsibilities.
Depending upon the terms of the SLA contract, there are usually two payment options:
- You will pay a monthly fee for using the hardware.
- The payment gets incorporated into the fee structure for installing, monitoring, and maintaining the equipment.
The best part is that if the hardware becomes outdated or breaks down, the responsibility for repairs or replacement then falls to your IT company. When the device gets replaced, the decommissioning process begins:
- Proprietary data gets wiped
- Hard drives get physically destroyed
- Old or broken equipment get recycled legally, and it is certified
4 Advantages That HaaS Offers
Beyond the actual hardware and associated services that HaaS offers, you likely want to know – what can you expect as actual benefits of this type of service?
In addition to everything explored above, HaaS offers other advantages as well:
- Outsourced Management: When your IT company implements, maintains, updates, and manages your hardware, any internal IT personnel you have gained back a significant amount of time.
- Free Physical Space: If you have some outdated hardware on-premises that need upgrading, that old equipment can easily take up vast amounts of physical office space. Instead of sinking money into new devices, you’ll reclaim valuable office space while getting the most recent technologies.
- Security: As a part of HaaS, your IT company will deploy powerful firewalls, virus scanning technology, updating patches, and continuous maintenance, keeping you safe from cybercrime threats. When utilizing HaaS, concern about the security of your hardware is eliminated.
- Reduced Capital Expenses: The key budgetary benefit of this service model is that you no longer have to invest capital in hardware. That funding gets freed up to be used in other areas of your business. Instead, your hardware, along with any other services provided by your IT company, fall under operating expenses, meaning you get an immediate, month-by-month return on the small flat rate you’re paying.
What Should HaaS Include?
There are five technologies, tied in with HaaS, that can be provided:
- Servers: File transfer equipment allows for instant file communication between two or more parties in a company. It’s quick and scalable. When leasing a server, either physical on-premises or virtual in the cloud, the file-sharing is at faster speeds with HaaS.
- Security Hardware: Security threats will never end, and an outdated firewall leads to security compliance issues. With cybersecurity, firewalls for HaaS have grown in demand and popularity, especially when preventing unwanted malware from entering a computer’s system.
- Workstations: When it comes to the actual desktop computers you and your staff use every day, your IT company will install the equipment into your environment. Rather than spending thousands of dollars for dedicated computers, you would use the monthly HaaS equipment option that reduces upfront costs with no change to the end-user.
- Data Storage: There are shared and saved files, storage, and backups that must be secured. When your storage appliance runs out of data storing space, that’s when networks or computers grind to a screeching halt. When deploying a storage appliance with your IT company, your needs are analyzed and storage space is scalable and optimized for storage speed needs.
- Switches and Routers: These devices allow workstations to efficiently communicate and route data within your business and internet-connected devices. To run at the best speeds, smart switches and routers are used to route traffic quickly to the correct device, user or private groups on your network.
Leave Your Hardware Management To NOVA Computer Solutions
Maintaining, replacing and managing hardware is a lot of work — why are you still handling it all on your own? Take it off your to-do list in three simple steps:
- Call the NOVA Computer Solutions team and book a free consultation at a time that works for you.
- Let us assess your IT systems and take an inventory of your hardware.
- Allow us to manage maintenance, repair, and replacement from this point forward.
