Enterprise IT environments are becoming increasingly complex as new technologies drive different deployment and management models. Demands on employees continue to grow, as does the breadth and depth of capability required of them. As a result, teams are drawn away from strategic initiatives to manage systems that aren’t delivering impactful business value.
This blog explores why more enterprises are turning to managed IT service providers – allowing them to regain focus on core business outcomes, drive OpEx efficiency, and deliver better internal and external customer experiences.
What are enterprise managed IT services?
‘Enterprise managed IT services’ is the collective term for outsourced support and operational responsibility for IT infrastructure (be it hybrid cloud environments, security, automation, optimisation, and so on). A Managed Service Provider (MSP) handles all the day-to-day operational tasks required to ensure a client organisation’s critical workloads perform as required. Think of it as an extension of your organisation.
Enterprise IT challenges today
For many organisations, the challenge is focus. How do we ensure our team has the capacity to concentrate on what actually matters? How do we free our teams to deliver productivity and customer experience improvements, rather than just maintaining systems? How do we improve outcomes without impacting delivery or adding risk?
But answering these questions is increasingly difficult as environments grow and internal capability is stretched. For most organisations, it comes down to these core challenges.
Constraining costs and rising complexity
Supporting increasingly complex environments takes more time, skills and people than many internal IT teams have available.
- Organisations face increasing pressure to do more with less.
- Hybrid and multi-cloud infrastructure models increase the operational skills burden.
- Legacy technologies and shrinking resource/skill pools exacerbate inefficiencies.
- External pressures (e.g. ISVs, vendors) are driving continual change in today’s IT environments, whether on the roadmap or not.
Shadow IT and security exposure
Shadow IT – the practice where employees implement environments outside existing controls – is often driven by frustration. When teams can’t do what they need to quickly to deliver results, they can resort to solving problems themselves, believing they’re helping the business. In reality, they are often exposing the organisation to unexpected or unmanaged security vulnerabilities and costs. These risks can vary greatly – examples include:
- Not turning off consumption-based cloud services used for testing can lead to spikes and unexpected spend impacts.
- Unmonitored environments can expose organisations to major security and compliance risks when normal controls are not applied.
- Compliance and regulatory demands continue to increase across most industries, raising the stakes of unmanaged environments.
No organisation wants to discover the impact of shadow IT only after it has made front-page news due to a cyberattack.
How an enterprise MSP can help
Organisations today want to focus on what is most important – satisfying customers and growing their business – not on the IT environments that underpin this success. An enterprise MSP can take on the operational load so internal teams can focus on productivity, innovation, and customer experience. A partnership with an MSP can:
Bring innovation and continual improvement
- Support to drive innovative ways of delivering the demands of IT in a scalable, repeatable, and secure manner.
- Continue to enhance the underlying environment to drive performance, efficiencies, and outcomes.
Help setting strategy and roadmaps
- Understanding what drives your organisation and helping to align IT to support the delivery of the strategy.
- Deep experience, knowledge and advisory services to ensure continual improvement is delivered to all stakeholders throughout the organisation.
Drive automation and AI for improved outcomes
- Elevated service levels through rapid remediation driven by automation and innovative AI practices.
- Extending automation to streamline processes, delivery, and orchestration of in-demand services.
Move from responsive to pre-emptive service outcomes
- Enhance outcomes through pre-emptive insights, driving automated remediation before they become issues.
- Utilising AI for the identification of recurring incidents to drive high-value outcomes through automated actions.
Shift IT from operations to outcomes
Most organisations don’t set out to become IT companies, yet many maintain internal teams that spend significant time deploying and maintaining environments – rather than improving the products and services that make the organisation successful. An enterprise managed IT services partner removes that operational load so teams can focus on the work that really matters.
Advent One doesn’t just run an environment. We help teams to continue innovating, modernising and adopting new technologies effectively. We have found that progress often stalls, not because tools aren’t available, but because adoption requires time to build capability, confidence, and capacity. Talk to us today about how we can help your business.
A team you can trust
Advent One has over 15 years of experience delivering enterprise Managed Services across a broad range of technologies, from legacy platforms to hybrid distributed infrastructure to public cloud. We have a proven track record and the breadth of experience to deliver what matters most – a trusted partner that lets you focus on the things that make your business successful.