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Managed services are gaining popularity. And the reason is that with smart IT outsourcing, any company reduces the cost of the department itself and the administration of IT services, having a stable staff for the regular tasks while increasing productivity whenever they need more qualified developers. In this article, I will tell why managed IT solutions may be sweet for business.
What are operated services?
Organizations can use managed IT services to reduce internal IT burden or fill gaps left by existing IT roles and skills.
Simply put, the cloud provider becomes either a provider, integrator, or outsourcer for clients. By outsourcing routine tasks to an experienced professional, you can fully concentrate on running your business and not worry about infrastructure uptime issues in the cloud.
Following the terms of the SLA, the provider charges a fixed fee for the managed services. The document clearly defines specific services and delivery times and KPIs for measuring their success.
The question may arise why don’t you merely call in an outside specialist to diagnose and fix the problem for an hourly fee? In that case, you will only get help after something goes wrong. This will result in reduced productivity and downtime while you wait for an expert to fix your problem.
On top of that, the cost of such services is often higher. It can also be very high in case of urgent issues. That’s why most people stay in constant communication with a provider who maintains the infrastructure for a fixed monthly fee, with proven quality, and budgeting such a process is much more efficient.
What problems do outsourcing IT services solve?
The scope of the tasks can be as comprehensive as your company needs.
- IT infrastructure administration. Provider specialists monitor all physical and virtual infrastructure components: servers, cloud storage, networks, DBMS, etc., as well as applications, to help prevent and eliminate failures. Administrators can also perform occasional tasks for which it is not profitable to hire full-time professionals.
- Cloud migration. Moving to the cloud helps reduce the burden on your full-time IT staff, but that doesn’t mean your IT team won’t have work to do. An unfamiliar environment can be hard to manage and support. And this is where a managed services provider comes to the rescue – cloud experts will prepare the infrastructure and support the entire migration process.
- Expert support – the managed services provider can act as an expert to help the company migrate to the new technology. As a rule, cloud providers have great expertise in developing and deploying new services. Consulting helps businesses reduce the cost of comfort and increase flexibility, for example, by carrying out DevOps or migrating to PaaS platforms.
- Backup and disaster recovery. These are routine tasks that can be a lot of hassle but need to be done. Delegating this task to the provider will give you confidence that the process is set up, runs regularly, your data is not lost, and you get the necessary technical support in case of crisis.
All these problems can be solved by an expert, dedicated development team with years of successful practice in software development, like Serokell.
Why are managed services better than your own IT department?
Now I want to look at how a managed service can be better than your own IT department.
Costs. When independently maintaining the IT infrastructure, you need to sustain an IT department with sufficient experts to organize disaster recovery in case of failures, in some cases – 24-hour support for services. This is expensive and often makes sense only for large companies.
If a company uses outsourcing of IT infrastructure management, it is possible to reduce the number of specialists up to zero. The last case is not the most reliable but can be used by startups, and small and medium-sized businesses, which do not have enough resources to run and maintain their infrastructure and keep a large staff. Managed Services allow you to partially replace capital expenditures on launching IT systems with monthly operational spending, reducing costs significantly.
Predictability of costs. Suppose you have your own IT department working on maintaining IT infrastructure. In that case, administration costs are constantly growing with the development of your business, but they are not dissenting even in the case of sales drops. Peaks in demand during holidays, after promotional campaigns, sudden failures, and subsequent recovery work all change the burden on the IT system and IT department employees.
Paying for Managed Services by subscription makes IT infrastructure maintenance costs predictable: the company knows how much it pays to the provider for support, and a certain amount can be budgeted for service renewal. The price a company pays for ongoing infrastructure support is calculated according to the needs of the business. As a result, it can be optimized, for example, by eliminating unnecessary services or replacing them with others.
Hiring competent specialists. Hiring employees with high IT expertise is complicated and expensive. Sometimes it takes weeks or months to find the right specialist, and it happens that experts in new technologies are not available in the open market.
Managed Services allow businesses, including small ones, to access the expertise of large IT companies. IT providers employ high-level technical experts to develop and bring innovative products to market. Managed service providers will supply specialists with the skills you need to maintain your IT system and react to your demands at a reactive speed, helping you to concentrate on the main business issues while supplying your customers with excellent quality digital resources.
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