Many organizations often seek the services of a Managed Services provider to reduce the cost of IT operations. While a lower operating cost is one benefit, there are many, less obvious, benefits to leveraging a Managed Service that can bring tremendous value to commercial organizations.
Accelerate Risk Mitigation and Compliance
Recent studies indicate, while commercial organizations face the same data risks as large enterprises, many still have an informal approach to IT and lack the mature governance models required to protect sensitive data such as customer information and personally identifiable information. The cost of platforms and the expertise required to properly protect sensitive data can quickly move beyond the reach of many small organizations. Managed Services organizations offer immediate access to world class technology platforms and tools that are required to manage and protect sensitive and mission critical data.
Accelerate Operational Maturity
Managed Service providers bring Enterprise class operational processes through the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL). ITIL defines the best practice methodology for IT processes, including Incident Management, Change Management, Problem Management, and Configuration Management. While these methodologies can be expensive and time consuming to implement in-house, a Managed Service provider can bring enterprise class operational processes to a smaller environment and accelerate operational maturity. A new customer can quickly realize the benefits of existing processes and minimize the startup time and costs by simply leveraging the mature operational processes of a Managed Services provider.
Access to World Class Resources
Large enterprise organizations often have deeper pockets and offer richer benefit packages to prospective employees. This fact alone can give enterprise organizations a significant recruiting advantage over smaller organizations. In tight labor markets, commercial enterprises may simply not be able to compete for people with the skills and experience required to rise to the challenges of today’s complex IT environment. Managed Services providers offer a shared resource model that provides commercial organizations with access to world class talent that might otherwise be out of reach.
DevOps Automation
Nearly every large organization has invested in developing IT automation capabilities in some capacity. Enterprise organizations with large infrastructure environments realize significant business benefits that are derived from DevOps automation. But IT automation and the benefits derived from it should not be limited to enterprise organizations. Commercial organizations can also realize significant benefits by automating routine IT operations tasks, such as adds, moves, and changes.
While the start-up costs of DevOps tools and the development expertise required can be a significant barrier to entry, a Managed Services provider can offer a commercial organization the opportunity to derive immediate benefits from DevOps by leveraging existing platforms and code. By using code to automate routine and repeatable administration tasks, DevOps automation can reduce the dependence upon expensive IT resources that may be difficult to find in smaller markets or outside of populated areas.