Managed Services: Ensuring Transformation to Hybrid IT

Organizations are continually challenged to align IT initiatives with business goals. While the top business initiatives are centered around the financial metrics of optimizing profits, growing revenue and driving down costs, ensuring innovation, customer satisfaction and market penetration are critically important. Meanwhile, enterprise IT is tasked with maintaining the efficiency of the existing infrastructure, supporting new initiatives such as mobility, social media, cloud and big data, rapidly scaling to respond to critical business events, managing security and disaster recovery planning.

To transform IT functions that will closer align with the business, enterprises are turning to managed services. The resulting hybrid IT environment combines internal and external resources and may consist of some combination of traditional on-premises, hosted solutions or cloud-based SaaS, PaaS or IaaS services. Hybrid IT offers improved cost savings, better security and increased flexibility by outsourcing some IT functions and keeping others in-house.

Benefits of managed services to enable hybrid IT include:

• Business agility: A recent IDC study found that nearly 25% of U.S. enterprises need to respond to events such as natural disasters or security breaches in 24 hours or less, while 50% must respond in 48 hours or less. Managed services organizations are able to react faster to market conditions or business disruptions with a rapid response. Robust analytics help IT more readily assess current and future needs.
• Optimization of productivity and performance: Using managed services to augment IT helps improve resource utilization and staff productivity since the managed services provider can offload rote tasks and enable IT staffers to focus on more mission-critical activities.
• Integrated management across all IT environments: Managed services provide support across both traditional data centers and cloud-based initiatives, ensuring more efficient single-pane-of-glass control and management.

Not all managed services are alike. An enterprise considering a hybrid IT configuration should look for managed services providers that are:

• Cost-effective: If your managed service provider is unable to construct a hybrid IT environment to drive down costs while speeding time to market, they are not a good fit. Your provider should provide assurances of faster service provisioning, continued investment in infrastructure and technology improvements to meet ongoing business needs.
• Secure: Your provider should offer complete security protection, from managed firewalls to intrusion detection and virus protection, in addition to top-tier solutions for disaster recovery and business continuity.
• Transparent: Enterprises want to maintain control over their Hybrid IT, whether it’s provisioned via a managed service or not. The best managed service providers ensure complete visibility across all services, both traditional and in the cloud.
• Flexible: Every organization has needs specific to them, and those needs will change over time.  Your managed service provider should match their technology and governance systems to your specific enterprise needs. By offering a range of options (private/dedicated, public/shared or hosted/onsite), that are easily reconfigured as needed and support contracts tailored specifically to protect an enterprise’s critical intellectual property (IP). Your managed service providers flexibility is critical to your ongoing relationship.

Hybrid IT offers the best of both worlds, maximizing your investment with just the right level of third-party support. Whether it’s being aware of security patches and exploits before you are compromised, using predictive analytics to discover problems before something breaks or adherence to documentation and structured communication, OneNeck IT Solutions can provide you with the right mix of hybrid IT management. Far from replacing IT, we strive to augment your IT staff and relieve them from the mundane, so they can focus on the strategic tasks that matter most to your business.

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