What are they and what’s in it for me?

Managed services enable you to delegate your IT operations to a service provider, freeing you to concentrate on activities that enhance your core business profitability.

These providers function as your in-house IT department but at a significantly reduced cost. Common categories of managed services include:

• Backup and Disaster Recovery (BDR): Ensures that your data is regularly backed up and can be quickly restored in the event of data loss or a disaster, minimising downtime and ensuring business continuity.
• User Service Desk: Provides a help desk for your employees to resolve IT issues quickly and efficiently, improving productivity and reducing frustration.
• Storage Administration: Manages your data storage needs, ensuring that your data is securely stored and easily accessible when needed, while also optimising storage costs.
• Security Administration: Protects your IT environment from threats by implementing and managing security measures such as firewalls, intrusion detection systems, and regular security audits.
• Virtualisation Infrastructure Management: Oversees your virtual environments, including servers, desktops, and applications, ensuring optimal performance and resource utilisation.
• Server Infrastructure Management: Manages the physical and virtual servers that host your applications and data, ensuring they are maintained, updated, and running efficiently.
• Network Infrastructure Management: Ensures your network is reliable and secure, managing everything from routers and switches to firewalls and wireless access points.
• Hosted Email Infrastructure: Provides and manages your email servers, ensuring reliable and secure email communication for your organisation.
• Managed Print Services: Oversees your printing needs, managing printers, supplies, and maintenance to reduce costs and improve efficiency.
• Mobile Device Management: Manages the mobile devices used by your employees, ensuring they are secure, up-to-date, and compliant with your organisation’s policies.

By leveraging managed services, organisations can reduce IT costs, enhance security, improve service levels, and focus on strategic initiatives that drive growth and profitability.

What makes managed services so attractive to the customer?

• Predictable costs – no more paying for IT on a time and materials basis as the managed services contract covers all assets included in the contract for a low monthly outlay.
• Lower costs – compared to the cost of building IT services capabilities in-house, managed services have a much lower cost structure because overhead can be spread over dozens, hundreds or even thousands of clients.
• Lower client site downtime – managed services often bundles remove monitoring which allows the provider to both manage capacity and resolve faults often before the users has noticed an outage.
• Higher client productivity –due to the centralised nature of hosted solutions it is possible to provide high availability options that are often cost prohibitive for individual clients due to budget constraints.  These solutions will provide much higher reliability backed with SLA’s so downtime is again reduced.  This is part of the appeal of managed services and will lead to higher client productivity.
• More secure – in these times, everyone has to worry about IT security, however most clients don’t have the resources to hire an experienced security officer, managed service providers, or their vendors have these resources to ensure that all of their clients are protected from common and emerging IT threats.

There are many arguments in favour of the idea that managed services makes sense for a company, the most important fact is that managed services need to deliver value as there is no point in migrating or changing to a managed service if there isn’t new value created.