The IT market is undergoing a noticeable shift in its business model as traditional hardware and software technology players become more services-focused. After all, customers demand it — but not simply because of the rapidly changing and increasingly complex IT environments in which they operate. The move toward IT services is also driven by the challenges of simply doing business in today’s highly competitive digital marketplace. Faced with tight budgets and overtaxed resources, organizations are looking for ways to improve efficiency while managing risk and optimizing service delivery.
Moreover, with product capabilities becoming increasingly similar, IT services have become a strategic competitive differentiator. Customers can benefit from working with a partner with a history of providing various product solutions, while also offering separate consulting services that leverage the company’s deep technical expertise. Services are not only crucial to maximizing a customer’s return on their technology investments through ensuring proper implementation and configuration, but today’s service offerings can also provide customers with insights on operational processes incorporating IT best practices.
More is Better
In today’s environment, few organizations have the capability to tackle increasingly tough IT issues and technology alone cannot deliver on many of the challenges businesses face. However, tools and technologies together with flexible IT services are proving to be highly effective. According to PricewaterhouseCoopers’ Global Outsourcing study, 87 percent of respondents said outsourcing is delivering on desired business results. Additionally, 91 percent of companies who have outsourced said they will do it again. And, a recent research by Forrester indicates that companies that outsource IT functions save between 12 to17 percent of the cost of doing the work in-house.
Yet, not all outsourcing relationships are created equal. Survey respondents indicated that there can be a disconnect between the needs and expectations of customers and service providers. They singled out the importance of having a collaborative relationship with a provider. Identifying “expert” outsourcers, those providers who met customers’ business plan goals completely, survey respondents said their expert service providers were better collaborators, with 81 percent stating that they have honest and transparent dealings with providers. To that end, a growing number of IT providers are offering a variety of IT infrastructure management options, from task-specific outsourcing services to IT staff augmentation. By expanding their service models, IT providers provide the proven expertise, technologies and processes their customers need to produce business results.
Collaborating to Manage Risk
Regardless of the IT infrastructure management option an organization selects, one of the most important elements in the ensuing partnership is communication on managing risk. The most successful IT-services providers understand both the technical and business aspects of IT. The most effective consultants, in turn, help close the gap that traditionally exists between technology and business to help ensure that technology supports, and improves the business.
For example, the risks associated with managing data-protection environments range from data loss or data corruption to the financial risks associated with unmet service levels or unplanned outages. By assuming ownership of critical tasks such as backup, recovery and other data-protection technology areas, services consultants help customers reduce risk to the business.
These consultants have the technical expertise to increase backup success rates, reduce data loss and minimize business disruption due to data inaccessibility, quickly recover deleted files and database tables, and more. They also have the business expertise to properly analyze data protection risk and business impact, and develop solutions to mitigate risk.
Organizations may also leverage third-party consulting resources to augment their existing IT staff. These experts can quickly assume key project roles within any IT environment, which enables them to contribute unique expertise for strategic decision support and ongoing monitoring, administration, and maintenance of complex IT solutions. An on-site expert can immediately contribute technical and business expertise, while reducing the costs and inefficiencies that sometimes arise while finding and hiring IT experts. This allows for organizations to prioritize budget and staffing needs, and optimize the use of limited resources.
Getting the Most from Technology
Enterprises can miss opportunities to improve efficiencies when they fail to fully utilize the capabilities of the solutions they have already implemented. IT services experts possess a deep knowledge of advanced technologies, and the most successful providers know how to configure and manage the security, availability, performance, compliance, and other technologies from various vendors to suit their clients’ needs.
By leveraging their unique product expertise, these services professionals help organizations transform IT technology investments into realized business value. These technology experts help enable the organization’s long-term success by applying real-world knowledge and best practices for IT solutions honed often over thousands of engagements.
Improving Efficiencies
More and more enterprises are looking to improve operational efficiencies and optimize budgets in order to combat the exorbitant costs of managing and maintaining specific IT operations. By outsourcing a particular IT task to a service provider, organizations can not only meet their operational needs but also keep costs under control.
Outsourcing data-protection services, for example, can benefit businesses in a variety of ways by delivering optimized processes, unparalleled expertise, and in some cases, integrated technologies — all from a single provider — to drive down the cost of data protection.
With these services in place, the management of data protection is transferred to a more cost-effective alternative to in-house methods. Inefficiencies and complexities that result from inadequate evaluation, planning, and deployment of current technologies can be resolved, while gaps in data protection skills among IT staff can be addressed. At the same time, the utilization of backup and recovery software, hardware assets and related IT resources is enhanced, while challenges associated with finding and setting up an appropriate disaster recovery environment are addressed.
Early Warning
A growing number of IT infrastructure management-services providers also offer early warning services for their security-service customers. These capabilities provide better awareness of security threats, help organizations maintain business continuity, and offer actionable information that makes IT staff more efficient and effective.
The most comprehensive early warning systems leverage a variety of global sources such as vast networks of intrusion detection and firewall sensors, vulnerability databases, honeynets, malicious code submissions, spam-catching decoy mailboxes, and more. These data collection points give service providers valuable vendor-neutral sources to assess security data and form it into information that IT can use to protect the enterprise.
Of course, collecting such large amounts of data is challenging, and knowing what to do with it is even more difficult. Consequently, the most advanced services providers use both human and automated analysis to create a security picture that the customer organization can use. Once the data is analyzed, the resulting security intelligence is delivered in such a way that customer organizations can act quickly to mitigate risk.
As IT environments continue to increase in complexity and help drive business growth, organizations will most likely shift from using their valuable IT resources to manage tasks that are high risk and high expertise to partnering with industry experts in order to free IT to concentrate on other strategic initiatives.
Technology providers, in turn, will continue to expand their offerings to provide a range of services designed to manage certain tasks or augment an organization’s existing IT staff. Either way, customers stand to benefit from being able to leverage the proven technologies, processes and expertise required to thrive in an increasingly competitive digital world.
Todd is director of consulting services for Symantec's Global Services business unit, which provides customers insight to give them control of IT risk and help them optimize operations.
