Understand the Difference Between Remote Hands And Smart Hands

In today’s swift digital landscape, businesses heavily rely on their IT infrastructure to drive innovation, operations, and growth. With the increasing complexity of IT systems and the demand for persistent uptime, companies often require on-site assistance for tasks ranging from equipment installation to troubleshooting. 

This is the time when “Remote Hands” and “Smart Hands” services come into play. You must have heard about that, if not, you’re landing on the right place. 

Remote hand and Smart hand services provide valuable support to businesses, ensuring that their IT operations run smoothly. These two types of service offerings have taken center stage in ensuring smooth operation of data centres. They provide unmatchable support for managing the physical infrastructure of data centers – a task more critical now than ever before.

But the question is what exactly are Remote Hands and Smart Hands services, and how do they differ? And why should you care? 

They both, however, play separate but necessary roles in preserving efficiency in an increasingly virtual workplace. Understanding their distinctions, however, might be difficult if you are unfamiliar with the complexities of data centre operations.

Don’t worry; we’ll describe each service in simple words so that by the end of this article, you’ll know precisely what each service comprises and which could be most suited for your company needs in the middle of this pandemic-induced shift towards remote working environments.

Let’s dive into the details and explore the distinctions between these two crucial offerings.

What are “Remote Hands” Services?

Remote hands data center services are like freelancers that are sitting remotely for managing co-located equipment. With the right support services, these remote hands acting as your eyes, ears, and technical prowess on-site when you can’t be there.

Remote hands are a service provided by colocation facilities that help manage some of the physical aspects of your server infrastructure. It includes tasks such as checking port numbers, securing cabling, rudimentary observation of the environment, observing or reporting indicators on equipment, and server reboots. 

These duties are completed remotely, with the client not needing to visit the colocation centre. These services are often included in the agreement with the chosen colocation site.

Why are Remote Hands Services Vital?

When leasing space from a site far from their actual location, IT administrators typically consider remote hands services. This enables businesses to administer their data centre without sending technical personnel to the colocation site. 

Remote hands services also enable you to manage IT activities that fail in the middle of the night or on holidays. Support difficulties usually occur when we least expect them. Remote Hands services may be provided 24*7, even when no one from your IT department is accessible.

Remote Hands Services

Remote Hands services are typically tailored to each colocation facility. To give you an idea, below are some of the conventional duties covered by remote hands services:

• Moving or securing network cables
• Network router and switch configuration
• Server refreshes and reboots
• Hardware and software replacement or installation
• Power cycling
• Inventory management and labeling
• Handling shipping and receiving requests
• Reporting on equipment performance
• Audits

Why Should You Leverage Remote Hands Services?

Remote hand services are ideal for businesses that lease space in a colocation facility situated hundreds of miles away from their location.

These services enable businesses to manage your data center without incurring the costs of sending your IT team to the colocation facility.

And the best part is that remote hands services let you complete critical IT activities at odd hours, on weekends, and on vacations. What’s more, these services are available 24/7 even when your IT staff isn’t available.

Keep in mind that IT infrastructure problems usually appear when you least anticipate them.

The ability to respond swiftly to significant IT issues within a data centre means that you may enjoy guaranteed uptime with greater speed and flexibility.

Remote Hands Support Services Pros & Cons:

If you choose a colocation provider to keep your data centre off-site, you should think about deploying remote hands assistance. The following are some of the benefits and drawbacks of remote hand help services to consider while making your decision:

What are “Smart Hands” Services?

Completing complicated and technological jobs is part of smart hands services. Smart hands services are on-site technical assistance for enterprises that store their IT infrastructure in third-party-managed facilities. Smart hands services may be quite beneficial to companies trying to optimise their IT processes.

More sophisticated activities require someone to be physically present in the colocation site to handle. Setting up a firewall, media and supply management, managing data centre equipment, equipment testing, complex cable setups, and basic troubleshooting are a few examples.

Smart services are often not included in colocation provider pricing because of the additional knowledge required. Smart Hands services are instead charged by the hour. Organizations must work with colocation providers to determine which services are not covered.

Why are Smart Hands Services Vital?

There will always be times when your IT department’s plate is overburdened. It is not ideal for any expanding organization to have an IT crew that manually oversees all datacenter operations. This would need keeping a bigger IT team as well as offering extensive training, both of which would drastically limit your profit margin.

By relieving your IT staff of infrastructure concerns, they will be able to focus more on value-added initiatives. Smart Hands Services help businesses improve their data infrastructure without sacrificing productivity. They provide rapid solutions to different data centre issues in order to prevent liability concerns and potential data breaches.

Smart Hands Services

Smart Hands services are often tailored to each colocation facility. To give you an idea, smart hands services often cover the following tasks:

• Configuration of the firewall
• Complex cable configurations
• Placement device management
• Test devices and fix errors
• Rack and stacking services
• Shipping and receiving
• Automated maintenance
• Setting up and Maintaining Backups
• Pack and unpack
• Inventory
• Detect and respond to threats
• Moving equipment
• Operating system and server installation
• Power cycle
• On-site and off-site technical support and troubleshooting
• Remote server restarts
• Cloud cross-connect

Why Should You Leverage Smart Hands Services?

It gets more difficult for your in-house IT team to keep up with developments as your company expands. However, in order to deliver services, commodities, and customer support, your organisation must be online.

However, the last thing a growing business wants to do is jeopardise its momentum by having its IT team handle operations manually within a data centre.

Furthermore, it would be impractical to hire and educate a big IT workforce to maintain your equipment operational.

Smart hands services not only free up your IT personnel but also save you money. Furthermore, it enables you to expand your data infrastructure without sacrificing efficiency.

Furthermore, these services enable your organisation to respond quickly to data centre concerns, lowering liability issues and potential data breaches.

Pros and cons of smart hands services

Smart hands services, like any business services, have advantages and disadvantages. 

Remote Hands vs. Smart Hands Support: Which One Should You Choose?

Remote and smart hands services are critical for both small and large enterprises. If your company’s IT equipment and servers are housed in a colocation facility, utilising both services can assist keep your infrastructure up and operating at full capacity.  

As a result, you will save money and reduce the impact of scheduled or unforeseen downtime. Using both services ensures that your company’s physical data centres and servers are adequately cared after, especially if they are housed in an off-site colocation facility.

Remote Hands services are often first basic support services provided by data centre colocation providers. These include remote IT help, which has previously been limited to minor tasks.

In contrast, smart hands services cover more complicated tasks like equipment installations and configurations, setting up firewalls, setting up automated maintenance functionalities, etc.

Remote Hands VS. Smart Hands

As previously said, different colocation facilities provide varying services. They may provide the majority, if not all, of the data centre support services listed above. In terms of services, remote hands and smart hands are vastly different.

Remote Hands services frequently involve colocation providers’ first support services. These often involve limited remote IT support. Depending on the demands of the organisation, simple actions such as cycling a server’s power, monitoring the state of an indicator light, and sending the information back to the client are done.

Smart hands services, on the other hand, go beyond what colocation facilities originally give. At an additional cost, Smart Hands service includes sophisticated activities such as receiving hardware shipments and executing hardware deployment. Companies can also send a professional to the data centre to fix items like hard drives and power supply devices.

Aspect	Remote Hand Services	Smart Hand Services
Definition	On-site technical assistance provided by data center staff or third-party technicians, remotely guided by remote engineers.	Enhanced version of remote hand services, often incorporating automation, AI, and IoT technologies for more intelligent and efficient operations.
Purpose	Physical tasks requiring on-site presence, such as equipment installation, troubleshooting, server reboots, cable management, etc.	Same tasks as remote hand services but with added automation, predictive maintenance, and real-time monitoring capabilities.
On-Site Technician	Typically, data center staff or third-party technicians who follow instructions from remote engineers or IT professionals.	May involve a combination of on-site technicians and advanced technologies like robots, sensors, and AI-driven systems.
Communication	Primarily guided through verbal or written instructions from remote engineers or IT personnel.	Utilizes advanced communication tools, IoT devices, and AI interfaces to streamline interactions and provide real-time updates.
Scope	Limited to physical tasks and basic visual assessments; dependent on human skills and expertise.	Expands beyond physical tasks to include data analysis, predictive maintenance, real-time monitoring, and more.
Efficiency	May have limitations in terms of speed and accuracy due to reliance on human actions and potential communication gaps.	Aims for higher efficiency through automation, data-driven decision-making, and reduced human intervention.
Scalability	Limited by the availability of on-site technicians and potential delays in executing tasks.	Generally more scalable due to the integration of automated systems and the ability to handle multiple tasks simultaneously.
Cost	Cost may vary based on the expertise of on-site technicians and response time required.	May involve higher upfront investments in technology but can lead to cost savings in the long run through improved efficiency and reduced downtime.
Examples	Rebooting a server, connecting/disconnecting cables, replacing hardware components.	Monitoring equipment health in real time, automatically scheduling maintenance tasks, analyzing performance data to predict issues.

How Go4hosting Networks Can Help You

Go4hosting Data Centers remote and smart hands specialists are readily available to ensure that your IT infrastructure and applications hosted in our colocation facility remain operational even if you don’t have the time to be on site.

To streamline the process of outsourcing data center operations, we offer several services designed to secure your operations and reduce outages. Remote hands and smart hands help may be extremely beneficial to any organisation, large or small. You can guarantee that your equipment is in good working order and that any IT issues are resolved promptly and effectively if you choose the proper supplier and services. 

Our Remote Hands and Smart Hands services cover simple and rapid interventions like on-demand restart, rack installation, cabling, and more sophisticated operations.

We at Go4hosting Networks are here to assist you in making the best decision depending on your individual requirements.