Outsourcing is nothing new for businesses. You readily outsource a range of responsibilities, from cleaning to corporate payroll and customer service. When it comes to managed services and relieving your IT department of some of their duties, you may hear some pushback. Here’s how to talk about it so you can take some pressure off your overworked IT team and keep extra money in your budget.
The Options
Almost everything IT handles can be delegated to managed services. Many companies begin by investing in Software as a Service (SaaS), and once they see how beneficial it is, they start prioritizing outsourcing areas of IT that no longer make sense to keep in-house. Some of the various strategic approaches that enterprises take include:
Disaster Recovery: Many enterprises find it difficult to dedicate adequate time to disaster planning, from developing a plan to testing and implementing it. It often makes sense to hire a disaster recovery provider who can advise, create a plan, and ensure the enterprise is ready for a variety of potential disasters.
Security: Threats change almost by the minute, and enterprises are hard-pressed to keep an adequate security team staffed with the range of expertise necessary to monitor, isolate, and address security concerns.
Help Desk as a Service: Help desk is generally an entry-level IT position, and it can suffer from high turnover and difficulty staffing as mobility allows for round-the-clock access to systems. When managed services handles the help desk, enterprises gain a wide range of expertise and 24/7 support for their employees.
Infrastructure as a Service: As enterprise IT becomes more complex with cloud migration, so does the network. Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) options make it easier for organizations to support the newest infrastructure innovations.
These are just a few of the areas of managed services that enterprise IT is finding beneficial to their budgets and objectives. There are many benefits that apply across the board to as-a-service offerings:
Scalability: When you outsource to managed services, you pay only for the service you use. It’s easy to increase or decrease your usage, depending on the promotions, holidays, or other circumstances impacting your need for support.
Reduced Costs: From shifting IT investments from a capital expenditure to a monthly operating expense to not having to own or maintain hardware, there are a lot of opportunities for enterprises to rededicate surplus funds to other areas of IT.
Removing Pressure From IT: IT is increasingly stepping away from the maintenance role and into a more strategic function in the organization. They are able to drive business objectives by making key recommendations on how to best utilize technology for a better customer experience and a competitive edge. As enterprises become more comfortable with managed services, IT will become more central to the strategy.
If your enterprise is considering managed services for a more streamlined and strategic approach to technology, contact us at eXemplify. We can help you identify the areas that would provide the most measurable benefit and then help you choose the solution that meets your budget and promotes your business objectives.