Tuesday, 15 September 2020
What are managed services? Why do you need them? Prolifics Testing can liberate your business from the constraints set by manual performance of routine IT tasks.
Every leader wants to keep their attention on running their business, but all too often difficult tasks arise which take up valuable time and energy. At the moment, resources are strained but work has to continue. That’s where a trustworthy Managed Services provider comes in.
First of all: what are Managed Services?
Simply put, a Managed Services provider takes the pressure off your IT staff and lets them get on with other things. In short, you’re outsourcing selected functions to a Managed Services Provider (MSP). MSPs offer the specialised skill set, flexibility and scalability to keep whatever system, platform or infrastructure you want, cloud or on-prem, going strong 24/7.
Why are Managed Services more useful now than ever?
(1) Things have changed.
By that we mean, “the pandemic has created a paradigm shift to a new normal.” It’s very possible your company has lost IT staff. You’ve had to adjust your processes and procedures to accommodate people working remotely. You’re trying to do more work with less people. It’s hard to scale up or down as needed. Give some of that work up and rely on the MSP. Any issues, and they’re the ones having to clean up the mess and start again. If they’re reliable, you and your customers need never know anything happened.
(2) You have more important things to do.
The legacy systems you have are chugging along, but they need a lot of maintenance and updating to keep things running. You need your staff to be more strategic-minded and working on higher level, value-added projects, but it’s hard to do when they’re mired in the day-to-day. Offload that boring work to the MSP and free up your staff for more important work, like updating those legacy systems.
(3) You have a big, new shiny system – now what?
It’s the reverse of (2) above. To stay competitive your company has done its digital transformation, application modernisation and systems integration. That’s a good thing. You and your IT staff teamed with the consultants as everyone decided what’s next and what’s best; you all helped the outside implementation firm get things up and running. Now the outside firms are gone, and you have to keep this brand-new machine going. You just don’t have the skill sets internally to keep up with it – and that’s not a slam against your staff. (We can’t all be Kubernetes experts.) The latest digital solutions can be highly specialised, and you’re not going to have people that specialised on your team working 24/7, but the MSP will.
(4) You want to get costs under control.
This applies to all the previous points above. You can’t get a handle on your costs if you’re unable to scale correctly; running through staff; underutilising talent; or hiring talent that’s too specialised. An MSP with a service level agreement (SLA) means set, known costs (or range of costs) that you can budget for with certainty. You’ll find that in the long run it’s more cost efficient than having the staffing issues.
(5) You want one person to blame.
If something does go wrong in the middle of the night, you don’t want to waste time figuring out who’s on shift or finding who’s next on the emergency call list, or – heaven forbid – getting out of bed yourself. The MSP is the single, accountable contact that’s one phone number away.
Prolifics Testing can help
The “New Business Normal” is here. You have a vision – don’t let your technology get in the way. Our Managed Services solutions and experience will get you there. Sit down with us – let’s talk about your challenges, review and reevaluate your plans, and get you started where it makes the most sense.
Consult, Transform, Deliver. It’s not just our tagline, it’s what drives us. It’s how we deliver solutions and services. It’s our commitment to you – and it’s needed today more than ever.
Find out more
Contact us for a confidential, no-obligation chat about Managed Services, and set-up demos and a Proof of Concept exercise of how we can help. You can also read our Managed Services case study about how we supported Cancer Research UK.
