How Managed Services Can Help Enterprises?

January 12, 2020January 12, 2020 kleinmendez

Managed Services can help enterprises manage and deploy multi-vendor environments, save money, focus on strategic applications, remain agile and reduce business risk. Steve Tonge explains how.

Modern CIOs are frequently caught between a rock and a hard place. Technology is seen as a key driver of innovation and efficiency, but business priorities change quickly and the CIO is often struggling to catch up. However, the increasing complexity of the IT and communications environment is using up valuable resources and IT projects can take up to a year to plan and deploy. This could mean that last year’s priority could become this years’ unnecessary expense before it has even finished.

Managed services can help these beleaguered CIOs by taking away the headache of running and deploying a converged infrastructure. We look at five reasons why managed services can help with IT-business alignment:

Manage multi-vendor, multi-technology environments effectively

Nearly all enterprises have combined their voice and data networks to some extent, with analyst Frost & Sullivan reporting that three-quarters of telephony deployments are now IP telephony. This convergence increases complexity and business demands for video and remote collaboration are making well-performing networks more important than ever.

In addition the chances are that enterprises will have a mixed technology environment. These multivendor environments may have emerged because of mergers and acquisitions or simply because different offices had different purchasing strategies. Managed Services can help enterprise access the skills and expertise of third parties have of managing complex infrastructure.

Deploy new networks and technology

In addition to running the current enterprise environment, managed services are ideal for helping enterprises upgrade to a new generation of technology. Many Managed Services contracts are often based on “walk-in and take-over model” where the service provider will take over all the contracts and management of the existing infrastructure and migrate it at an agreed pace over to a new environment. Not only will the enterprise benefit from a single point of contact for its existing environment, it also can migrate to the latest technology with the minimum of disruption and cost.

Reduce spending on non-strategic activity

Spending less on keeping the infrastructure running and investing less in upgrading the communications environment is one of the strongest reasons that enterprises choose managed services. This is because managing converged networks is an expensive business: enterprises will need their own network operating centre, monitoring tools and trained staff and the CAPEX required for this alone will frighten many organizations.

Managed Services allow service providers to leverage their existing investment in equipment, tools and skills to offer a price point some 15-20% lower than the enterprise can achieve alone.

Remain agile and meet strategic business priorities

With staff and budget reallocated from managing infrastructure, managed services can help enterprises focus on strategic project and business applications. By putting their internal IT staff on internal application development, enterprises can ensure that the entire team is aligned to business needs.