The increasing challenges of providing current, reliable IT services are placing strain on many businesses as technology becomes central to all business and industries. No business sector is free from technology, however not all businesses are making the most of the technology that is available and relevant for their situation.
The movement away from boxes and wires into cloud-hosted services has changed how IT services are delivered on the ground. The old support models for IT are no longer effective. With on premise server infrastructure at the core of any corporate environment, skilled onsite IT resources were required to efficiently manage and maintain the environments. Typically, the core skill requirements for an on premise resource were server and infrastructure management. Internal IT skill focussed on the maintenance of the server environment as a primary focus with end user support secondary. Moving forward Research predicts 83% of enterprise workloads will be in the cloud by 2020 (source Forbes).
This shift alters the support model considerably. No longer are highly skilled infrastructure resources required in your business. Service providers such as Microsoft, AWS and CISCO are taking on the mechanical side of the infrastructure, and with it much of the time-consuming onsite works that were previously required.
The modern support loads are top heavy with end-user support, with much of the infrastructure load removed by the service provider. The challenge for businesses is internal staffing requirements for this new model.
Most of the effort required to deliver support to a business is now L1 and L2, however there is still a requirement for some L3 & L4 abilities within the new cloud platforms. This is especially felt when a problem occurs!
Taking outsourcing off the table initially, organisations need to find the balance between staff and capability. Without the luxury of scale to align staff ratios to suit medium to large businesses, IT support forces organisations to face the challenge of finding the right people to service the business cost effectively.
Most often businesses will position staff at the high L2 end of the scale, so they are situated to be able to support most of the requirements of the business. This seems to be a practical approach up front but less cost-effective upon further analysis.
In addition to the higher salary, training and retention costs, the resource is unable to support all areas of the business, which would lead to either business risk or additional operational costs. On the other side of the coin if much of their day-to-day workload is L1 tasks, job satisfaction and therefore staff retention becomes an issue and risk to the bottom line. Alternatively, they may go in at the lower level and increase the business risk or lose control of vendor support costs.
This is where the modern managed service comes in to play. A good Managed Service Provider (MSP) for the true cost of a full-time resource (True cost would encompass overheads, recruitment, training, retention, management etc.) will provide a service which meets all of the tiers of this support model. They can leverage enterprise tools for proactive monitoring and maintenance, which cannot be justified on a smaller scale; they have a larger support desk with backfill, management, training and career progression opportunities, access to higher-level technical resources and often access to high-level consultants or architects.
A managed service is also more scaleable than an internal resource model, and can grow or shrink with business needs as well as being able to adapt to complement an existing internal team through the provision of entry-level service desk or higher-level escalation services as well as offering SaaS offerings to enhance the operational environment.
With Infrastructure moving to a service, it is natural that the support model to maintain it also moves to a service as well.
The MSP support model offers significant peace of mind knowing that the right level of skills, capability and scale is available when it is needed, especially to solve problems that are more tricky. These are ones that require experience, true capability and local presence. Talk to Myriad Services today around how we can provide enterprise grade skills and capabilities to support your business.