Managed services and SaaS solutions for SMEs and corporates
The managed service concept has relevance to firms across the size and vertical spectrum from emerging SMEs to established corporates. They share common drivers – the desire to boost growth, increase efficiency, reduce costs, enhance quality, sharpen competitiveness and deliver greater value to stakeholders and shareholders. Technology has an integral part to play in all of these – and outsourcing all or part of it can give companies significant business advantage.
Whether it’s a fully managed service that embraces everything from infrastructure to software or the delivery of a discrete application using the Software as a Service model, they can leverage the expertise of an IT specialist to help drive performance and improvement.
There are four key issues that an externalised IT service can help address:
- Security and business continuity
- Business flexibility
- Core competencies
- In-house expertise
Security and business continuity
Downtime and/or data loss can severely damage operations, finances and reputations - outsourcing enables firms to adopt the latest technologies in data security whilst also working within an environment that can provide a full disaster recovery solution. Outsourcing the risk is often key to the decision to partner with e-know.net.
Business flexibility
Most businesses are alert to the importance of providing new and different functionality, such as the need to support remote or mobile working, while also keeping one eye on data integrity and system protection. That can add extra layers to the infrastructure and call on extra resources; it can also take time to achieve, depending on the skills and budgets available. The same goes for any major initiative that a firm wants to roll with – the desire may be there but is the experience, expertise and manpower? And yet agility and responsiveness are everything in a market where predictions abound that the quick will devour the slow.
Core competencies
So many firms with aggressive ambitions and a clear growth strategy want to focus on what they do best. They also know that no business can thrive today without being able to run and leverage a reasonable IT system. But IT is not what they do best and the prospect of investing in an in-house solution, having to manage that solution and having to keep pace with IT developments, is not an attractive one. It’s distracting, it’s difficult and it’s also very risky if you don’t get the right team or the right technologies together.
In-house expertise
It’s not easy to get the right know-how and know-why in place. The average IT network demands a fair range of hands-on skills and expertise; for those looking to compete and innovate through IT, there’s also a requirement for strategic thinking and more specialist knowledge; and then there’s the battle to keep talent and to keep it motivated. These are familiar challenges in a tricky IT labour market, challenges that professional services firms will recognise as ones they can’t always meet, despite their best efforts.
Given those issues, it is perhaps easier to see why progressive professional services firms are making the leap into an outsourced or managed service future. Cost-savings aside, they can:
- Enjoy industry-class, 24/7 support of their applications with an expert team of product specialists on tap
- Bring on stream new software and new functionality very quickly
- Focus exclusively on running their own business without the concerns of IT or IT people management
- Easily evaluate external performance through KPIs and SLAs
- Take advantage of trusted IT strategists to help drive IT and business planning
- Benefit from business continuity that comes as a welcome by-product of partnering with organisations that are founded on the basic premise of resilience.
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