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Moving Toward Managed Services - Is It Right For Your Enterprise? |
Processor.com
By Jean Thilmany
There’s little doubt that the use of managed services is increasing. According to CompTIA’s Annual SMB Technology Trends Study, small and midsized businesses are set to invest two to three times as much in managed services this year as compared to 2009.
Rather than buy or build IT applications, such as onsite storage or backup and recovery systems, many SMEs increasingly opt to outsource to managed services vendors. These vendors provide enterprises with the software (and even the hardware, in some cases) and maintain these services, taking away the hassle factor in the process.
Smaller Is Better
Analytics Operations Engineering, a 25-person company that provides operations consulting services, uses a managed services provider for email and Internet security, data servers, and disaster recovery. “Our IT seats aren’t transaction-based, so if we’re down for 15 minutes, it doesn’t cost us tens of thousands of dollars,” says Steve Bandler, the company’s chief operations officer. “A lot of times if our people have a technical problem, they’re not here in the office. So we use these remote providers to log in and detect and diagnose a problem,” he explains.Generally, it makes sense for enterprises with fewer than 50 people to go with managed tools for the majority of their IT applications, says Jim Lippie, president of Thrive Networks (www.thrivenetworks.com), a managed services provider. These smaller enterprises are hard-pressed to make use of one full-time IT staffer, Lippie explains. On average, a 50-person enterprise will spend about $36,000 per year on managed services, which includes an Exchange, domain, and file server; remote backup; and possibly a BlackBerry enterprise server to run wireless devices, Lippie says.
The managed services provider installs tools into those environments to monitor the servers and resolve issues before they can cause problems, he says. An enterprise of the same size may have to budget between $50,000 and $70,000 annually for a single IT staffer to perform the same tasks.
“But once you get over 50 people, it can make sense to have a full-time administrator with managed services augmented,” Lippie adds. That’s because IT personnel at smaller enterprises are hard-pressed to keep up with and know all aspects of every application used within the enterprise, says Carl Hillier, director of strategic marketing for infrastructure services at Fujitsu America (www.fujitsu.com/us). Using a managed services provider for some applications, typically backup and storage, helps take the slack off the IT department in these cases.
What to Look For
Enterprises must view bringing in a managed services provider with a strategic eye, and Hillier offers some tips for getting the most from your investment. He suggests making decisions from a long-term perspective. “You have to think of what you’ll need in the future as well as the present,” he says. “You may be looking at data center hosting because you’ve reached the boundaries of current capacity. But you’ll need to see if your managed services provider can grow with your capacity moving forward.”He also advises reviewing the terms of a contract before choosing a provider. Vendor services vary. Backup management and various tasks may or may not be included. And support may be unlimited or on the clock with a pool of prepaid hours, he says.
To determine whether a managed services provider is right for your enterprise, Johnson suggests looking at the cost of a potential application you want managed over the course of three years. “If the three-year cost is close to the hardware, software, and labor you’d use, you should go the managed service[s] route,” he says.
“With managed, it’s typically easier to predict costs because you’re taking advantage of economies of scale,” he adds.