Whether you’re a business executive or a seasoned IT pro, using managed services can make your job easier. When effectively executed, a Managed Service (MS) is like gaining the capability of an IT Department with the expertise of seasoned professionals to deliver focused application operations to your company’s business application users.
Let’s take a look at Managed Services to see when and how they can benefit your company.
What is a managed service?
Simply put, an MS is designed to handle the daily operations of your specialized applications. A managed services can:
- Provide more capability to your company end-users
- Allow in-house IT to focus on more strategic IT programs
- Free your team to focus on your business’ core competencies
This shows up often when IT professionals notice a decline in the current repository of knowledge, reducing the quality of IT service to your company. Other symptoms of a need for an MS include following:
- “We didn’t achieve everything we wanted last year due to a lack of Service and Support.”
- “We had too many service outages and downtime.”
- “We overspent our budget on tweaks to our business applications that eroded its performance.”
- “We lost data due to lack of ability with the solution.”
From my experience working with small and large client companies alike, I often suggest how a managed service can help address these challenges. In my career, I have worked with many clients that are utilizing managed services in a variety of ways. Most recently, I provided a managed service to a large energy company which found the service to be seamless and significantly improved the satisfaction of end users and IT support staff, globally.
If you’re sensing some of these dynamics at your company, here are some personnel and technology suggestions on how you can reorganize and empower your IT Department for growth via MS.
Assessing the need for managed services
Today, IT managers are under significant pressure to meet the performance, operational expectations, and security needs of the business—all while trying to keep costs down. Most financial experts would suggest in these conditions to switch to a predictable cost model, like that of a managed service.
A company that provides such services is called a Managed Service Provider (MSP). The best time to consider speaking with a MSP is when you are:
- Setting future strategic goals
- Deploying new services to your IT environment
Many times, your existing staff may not be experienced with a new technology or able to maintain new services or applications. You could hire contractors to provide the service. But, given a static or declining budget, this may be more expensive and provide less value in supporting your company’s ever-growing performance goals. This is often true for small, medium, and large companies alike.
Managed Service models have evolved over time, and the seasoned providers have perfected their delivery. It is very effective for businesses that:
- Rely on their IT infrastructure to properly support their daily business processes
- Do not have sufficiently trained staff or time to formally deal with proper maintenance, updates, and repairs
- Want to pay one monthly, flat fee for services to provide a high level of service quality to the business
For most business services, IT underpins the business engine. From software to hardware and the skills required to keep the service running, a company could invest significant capital in building and maintaining the in-house support staff.
However, given the maturity of the managed service models and the shift to virtualization and cloud, the need for on-site IT staff can be limited to the exceptions where operational sensitivity justifies it. A company may consider leveraging managed service experts in order to ensure greater IT cost predictability amid uncertain requirements
