Information technology (IT) departments often devote up to 75% of their budget and 50% of their personnel to manage and maintain the existing infrastructure. This practice significantly limits a company’s ability to innovate. Particularly, midmarket companies are challenged by resource constraints to improve business performance and reach growth goals.

For 2010, IDC predicted a shift towards Remote Infrastructure Management services as a major tool to lower operational costs. By some estimates, about 60% of Fortune 2000 companies use remote infrastructure management (RIM) to some extent to lower operational costs. It provides companies with the ability to remotely manage IT infrastructure, such as workstations, servers, network devices, storage devices, and security devices. In that way, remote infrastructure management lowers infrastructure management costs and frees up resources that can be utilized to develop new products and services as well as business strategic initiatives. As such, remote infrastructure management is the perfect marriage of business process outsourcing (BPO) and IT services.

However, the majority of the midmarket companies have yet to discover remote infrastructure management as a strategic business growth tool. Following are three key reasons why midsize companies should consider remote infrastructure management.

1. Sharpened Focus on Business Priorities

Remote infrastructure management enables companies to outsource a large number of daily tasks, such as network operations, systems operation, data base operations, and security management. It can also help execute daily network operations center (NOC) and security operations center (SOC) task checklists and engage in business continuity/disaster recovery planning activities. Furthermore, remote infrastructure management can maintain other infrastructure components, such as storage devices and web servers. As a result IT organizations can assign their internal staffs to higher-value strategic initiatives and accelerate the speed of innovation and the time-to-market.

2. Maturity Catalyst

One of the largest growth hurdles for midsize companies is their ability – or inability – to mature business processes. Well documented, mature business processes promote business effectiveness and efficiency.

They also help companies strive for innovation, flexibility and integration with technology. According to Gartner, midmarket companies will need to develop processes internally to make offshore successful, as a result of moving to an offshore service delivery model for some parts of the IT requirements. RIM acts as a maturity catalyst, catapulting midsize companies into the next league by helping companies to prioritize and delegate IT tasks.

3. Cost Advantage

In general, remote infrastructure initiatives promise a 60% cost advantage within 3-6 months. They drive costs down by delegating operational tasks to highly skilled, while competitively priced, IT professionals.

With lower labor costs, IT organizations are able to apply more person-hours on an as-needed basis, resulting in higher service levels, reduced downtime, faster responses to problems, and improved application performance. It also provides them with the flexibility to scale up or down in response to changes in infrastructure or in the business.

In sum, remote infrastructure management has been successfully used by large businesses to propel business growth. Its combination of costs savings, mature business processes, and focus on business priorities offers a tremendous business growth potential for midsize companies. It could be their recipe for success to complete the rites of passage of becoming a larger business.