The era of managed ICT services

OUTSOURCING services have come a long way. I come from a time where we had to employ full-time janitors and messengers for our cleaning and delivery needs. But look at companies now. Today, it is commonplace to have even some accounting and human resources handled by a third party for a fee.

It frees the company to focus on the business. To make better in what they do best and not be distracted and burdened by the nuances and risks of hiring and maintaining full-time personnel to do tasks that are mere incidentals in running a company.

Fast forward to today. Information technology has grown to being just a cost center to an actual ‘enabler’ which provides companies improve productivity, enhance client services, automate tasks and many more. All of which directly translates to better margins and of

As IT continues to develop and improve what companies needed to have the expertise to maintain and operate computers and applications. The result has been a boom in information technology professionals as well as an uptick in the purchases of hardware and software.

The more complex your IT needs are, the more human and IT resources you would need. Internet-enabled products and services like stores, video and audio streaming, gam data mining and analytics are some that require some serious computing power to meet the demand and guarantee availability. That’s a lot of hardware and software right there. Normally, that would mean spending some serious money on servers, operating systems, applications, and programmers.

Today, you don’t need the servers and the software, the hard disk space, the processing power; even the bandwidth now automatically expands and contracts based on the people accessing them. Best of all – it is paid on a monthly basis depending on your utilization. That is, by subscription, no capital expenditure – just monthly recurring charges. When business is good, you pay higher of course. When business is so-so, you pay lower. When business dies, you just stop paying and that’s it! You do not need be stuck with hardware and software you can’t use or sell. What sorcery is this!? That, my dear, is the ‘Cloud’ for you, infrastructure. You would still need your bagful of techies and programmers though. But at least that’s one more problem out of window – no more hardware.

Now what if, you can outsource or subscribe to the same similar service but including the expertise? Yes, the techies, the network and systems administrator, the security guy, and even the programmers and technical support? Wouldn’t that be something?

What if you don’t have to worry if your guy is going to get sick, emotionally troubled, ‘not in the mood’ and, yes, maybe even your rockstar geek dying on you. Wouldn’t it be awesome, just to have an instant replacement to be there on standby and activated when the time comes?

What if you don’t have to worry about upgrades, maintenance and support fees? What if you never ever have to worry about hardware or software obsolescence anymore?

What if you don’t have to worry about who’s going to do the backups? Look after the security of the systems? Monitor for incidents and problems 24/7? And do the replacement and/or remediation? Incident response? Root cause analysis? Digital forensics?

Managed IT services alleviate the organization of the opera acquiring, operating, maintaining, and securing their critical information technology assets.

Why is managed IT services rel- evant and what is the case for it?

Managed services can accelerate transformations, enabling the cli transformation they are undertaking by using our resources and capabilities to drive the change quicker and more effectively.

You can now focus on core business development as outsourcing both the systems and the backend processes will free the organization of direct expense and management of maintaining a full-blown ICT department.

You can improve performance, enabling the client to achieve higher quality services for their end users by leveraging the skills of the third party.

You can lower TCO—managed services reduces the overall TCO associated with capital expenditure, depreciation, obsolescence, upgrades and maintenance contracts, employee management, training and others. You can mitigate risks—putting the client in a better position moving forward by leveraging managed ser the associated risk in procuring and managing ICT resources.

Yes, Mr. Jetson – you can now focus on improving and developing your widgets, making it better and increasing production, improve name recall, create sales strategies and sell more! Make your stakeholders and investors happy. Because the era of

has arrived.