Managed IT Services Dallas

Here are The Best Uses for Managed IT Services in the Enterprise

When most business people think about managed IT services, they think about small businesses and how it can assist them in providing IT expertise on a budget. This is certainly a very good use case, but not the only one. So what about the enterprise, where can managed IT services benefit them? Let’s take a look.

Before we dive into the use cases, let’s do some definitions. Regardless of what size business is using these managed IT services, there are 3 operational situations that may be present. In each case, the common element is that an outside company is remotely managing some or all of the customer’s IT environment with a team of engineers using a variety of tools to monitor and administer the customer’s system through connections over the internet. The 3 situations are:

• Customer has their compute environment in their own facility. This is pretty common since it was the computing paradigm of choice for the last 40 years. This is becoming increasingly expensive to absorb the costs not only of the equipment and environment, but also the personnel to run it.

• Customer continues to own their IT hardware and software, but houses it at a Co-Location Data Center. The value in this is that this is a controlled and redundant environment, and will eliminate many of the causes for down time. Plus this can save the customer the costs of maintaining a proper IT environment in their offices.

• Customer may have decided to decommission their entire system and have the managed services company host it for them using their hardware and software.  This allows the customer to get out of the IT business altogether and make all hardware, software and services costs operating expenses.

With any version of managed IT services, the primary benefit is that it provides outside expertise that would not be available to the customer easily or economically if trying to hire their own staff. It also provides support redundancy since the managed services vendor will have a whole staff working on all customers.

OK, with all that in mind, let’s see how this can benefit the enterprise corporation. Most enterprises have a full staff of IT professionals so it is not as obvious where the fit might be. Think about these cases:

• Remote manage specific functions rather than the entire IT system.  An example of this is something that we run across regularly. We manage the Citrix functions only for many customers because they don’t have in-house expertise to cover this area and can’t find a good person to hire, or can’t afford them if they do. This solves a significant problem for those customers.

• Staff supplementation or redundancy. Even many larger enterprises don’t have experts in all areas, or have only one person in a given specialty, so using managed IT services can address this problem by filling the void in that specific area, or providing a backup to the lone ranger in-house expert for when that individual is ill, at training, or on vacation.

• Remote offices or divisions, or separate user groups. Some organizations use decentralized IT in their remote offices or subsidiaries, and they may be good candidates for managed IT services. Along those same lines, there may be certain user groups, like road warriors or home users, that may benefit from outsourced management, especially of the enterprise IT team does not have the staff to handle their needs.

These are the most common needs that we see for managed IT services, but there are undoubtedly others. The key is that it provides expertise and manpower that the customer needs in a cost-effective and redundant manner.