You’ve built your IT team carefully, adding experienced and effective personnel over a long period. Your team knows your systems inside and out. They might even have built them from the ground up. They are experts who provide significant value to your organization.
But you’ve been hearing that the benefits of managed services could add value and you might be wondering: Why would you lose that huge competitive advantage that your local team represents, and hand the reins of your technology to someone else?
It can be difficult at first to see the value in a managed services approach to your technology infrastructure. But this model can provide your organization with considerable advantages without taking away from the great work your in-house team does.
The Benefits of Managed Services
1. Expertise
A managed services provider specializes in running infrastructure and staying abreast of technology trends. An in-house team can’t be expected to keep up with rapidly evolving technology, much less know when new components become available that can give your organization new advantages. Having a managed services partner with expertise in infrastructure is the best (and cheapest) way to make this expertise available for your organization.
2. Premier Support
Premier-level support for your Microsoft infrastructure is costly, and beyond the capacity of smaller organizations, but it’s essential to running your infrastructure effectively. With premier support, if your service provider can’t solve your problem, they can go straight to Microsoft to get in-depth root-cause analysis from their engineering QA teams. Bringing on a managed services partner that leverages premier-level support is the most cost-effective way to get this level of service.
3. Cost
Maybe you can do it all in-house yourself, but what is it costing you in time and resources? Can you afford the staff that you’ll need for an entire IT team, or would it be better to hire a service to do it all for you? From a cost point of view, it’s far better to let your IT team focus on their core competencies and your strategic initiatives like support for your enterprise systems and integrations and let a managed services partner provide the best practices and expertise specifically for your infrastructure to keep your running in optimally and securely.
4. 24/7 Support
IT issues don’t follow a 9-to-5 schedule, and your support can’t either. What would it cost to build an in-house team to work on a 24/7 basis? A better solution is to engage a managed services provider that has a blended team, pulling talent from a worldwide pool. They can provide round-the-clock coverage, ensuring that you are taken care of at any time, on any day.
5. Gap Filling
No matter how great your IT team is, it’s impossible for them to cover everything. Perhaps they lack experience in a certain area. Maybe a key member of the team will need time off, so you’ll need temporary support until they’re back. A managed services partner can fulfill those short-term needs to make your team even more efficient and effective.
The managed services approach won’t solve all of your IT problems. But understanding the benefits of managed services, the model and the potential advantages will help you create an accurate picture of your current and future IT needs and evaluate how to best meet them in the context of your larger organizational strategy.
Quisitive offers a cloud managed services program where you gain access to our expertise in Managed IT Services that spans a wide range of technologies.
We can help sustain your applications and technologies with routine support and environment management as well as advise you on strategic improvement programs and ongoing coaching.
Unlock the benefits of managed services with Quisitive.
Explore our different Managed Services offers or, for ad-hoc needs, see our Flex Services.
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Quisitive’s Velocity Insights tool allows you to monitor, diagnose, and prioritize errors efficiently with the help of AI and Machine Learning to reduce the time spent on fixing errors without compromising product quality.
Learn how this tool compares to other .NET tools, such as Jira or Jenkins.
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Quisitive Velocity enables predictability and transparency for initiatives that deliver cost-effective, high-quality technological capability advancement, providing businesses with technology-empowered agility to respond to ever-changing market demands.
You’ve built your IT team carefully, adding experienced and effective personnel over a long period. Your team knows your systems inside and out—they might even have built them from the ground up. They are experts who provide significant value to your organization.
But you’ve been hearing that managed services could add even more value, and you might be wondering: why would you lose that huge competitive advantage that your local team represents, and hand the reins of your technology to someone else?
It can be difficult, at first, to see the value in a managed services approach to your technology infrastructure. But this model can provide your organization with considerable advantages, without taking away from the great work your in-house team does.
The Benefits of Using Managed Services
- Expertise. A managed services provider specializes in running infrastructure, and their technicians are trained in it. An in-house team can’t be expected to keep up with rapidly evolving technology, much less know when new components become available that can give your organization new advantages. Having a managed services partner with expertise in infrastructure is the best (and cheapest) way to make this expertise available for your organization.
- Premier Support. Premier-level support for your Microsoft infrastructure is costly, and beyond the capacity of smaller organizations, but it’s essential to running your infrastructure effectively. With premier support, if your service provider can’t solve your problem, they can go straight to Microsoft to get in-depth root-cause analysis from their engineering QA teams. Bringing on a managed services partner that leverages premier-level support is the most cost-effective way to get this level of service.
- Cost. Maybe you can do it all in-house yourself, but what is it costing you in time and resources? Can you afford the staff that you’ll need for an entire IT team, or would it be better to hire a service to do it all for you? From a cost point of view, it’s far better to let your IT team focus on their core competencies and your strategic initiatives, and let a managed services partner provide the best practices and expertise specifically for your infrastructure to keep your running in optimally and securely.
- 24/7 Support. IT issues don’t follow a 9-to-5 schedule, and your support can’t either. What would it cost to build an in-house team to work on a 24/7 basis? A better solution is to engage a managed services provider that has a blended team, pulling talent from a worldwide pool. They can provide round-the-clock coverage, ensuring that you are taken care of any time, on any day.
- Gap Filling. No matter how great your IT team is, it’s impossible for them to cover everything. Perhaps they lack experience in a certain area. Maybe a key member of the team will need time off, so you’ll need temporary support until they’re back. A managed services partner can fulfill those short-term needs to make your team even more efficient and effective.
The managed services approach won’t solve all of your IT problems. But it has the potential to increase the effectiveness and value of your own team while giving you a number of other competitive advantages at the same time.
Managed services: you can’t go it alone
You’ve heard of managed services and managed services partners, of course, and you’ve probably even heard others make the case for it. It sounds so easy—just offload your IT services and pay a regular fee. But is it really that easy?
Of course not! And that’s why many organizations hesitate to simply give over their IT services to another organization. You’ve learned to live with and control your technology, an overloaded and under-resourced IT team, and high operational costs to keep it all running. But can you accept the risks and potential extra costs by not having it managed and supported full time?
So how can you throw it all aside and sign on with any managed services approach? Is it a matter of doing it all yourself until you simply can’t?
Maybe it isn’t an all-or-nothing approach—you don’t have to lose the advantages you’ve gained to date, but you also don’t have to go it alone. Quisitive has worked for many years as a managed services partner, and these are what we consider the key advantages of working with an organization like ours.
- Microsoft Premier Support. For businesses that don’t have IT at their core, the top level of Microsoft support is just too expensive. But the value it brings—immediate help and support for the vast offering of Microsoft’s many software products—is immense. Having a partner with this level of Microsoft can be key. Quisitive can leverage the Premier Support on your behalf.
- Technology Expertise. You can’t expect a small IT team to keep up with the many products and ongoing changes to your complex technology stack. Having a partner that specializes in on-premises and cloud technology is essential to ensure your services are managed effectively.
- Global team. Having a team located in multiple locations leads to cost savings and coverage that your own team can’t provide.
- Experience. When you push your infrastructure to the cloud, you need specialized knowledge and experience, not just for maintenance, but to create and set up your environment too. It’s difficult to get that competency with an IT team. You need a partner who’s done it before and can leverage our own Level 1, Level 2, Level 3, as well as Microsoft engineers.
Quisitive has taken on managed services work from a wide range of companies, with a variety of technology profiles. Our technicians are highly experienced with setting up and optimizing environments, executing migrations, and effectively managing services.
With a managed services partner like Quisitive, you can maximize the potential of the cloud, while ensuring your IT personnel are able to concentrate on high-value work.
Ready to learn more? Explore our Cloud Managed Services offering.
Companies wanting to modernize their applications are often eager to migrate to Azure, but they don’t always think ahead to what’s next. What happens once they’re in the cloud and the partner they’ve chosen to help with migration finishes their work? How do they make the most of their new cloud environment? Knowing how and when to leverage cloud managed services can mean the difference between a highly successful cloud strategy, and one that’s lackluster.
It’s an issue we see time and time again, and it’s something we tackle for our clients in two different ways.
Learn Along the Way
The first is through training.
As we work with a company throughout their migration process, we believe that the most effective approach is one that engages, guides and trains the customer at every stage along the way. This means that we make sure that the company’s IT team is up to speed throughout the process, so that once migration is complete the team isn’t simply dropped into the cloud to face a steep learning curve.
Knowledge transfer happens along the way, not at the very end, so by the time migration has finished, the team is trained, self-sufficient and ready to operate and innovate in the cloud. Possessing a strong understanding of the migration process means that the team will be able to begin reaping the benefits of Azure and unlocking the company’s investment immediately.
This is a proven approach, and one that we’ve seen great success with… if there’s a team that’s available or willing to be trained.
Engage with Cloud Managed Services
The second approach is to provide managed services.
The reasons for choosing this option are plenty. For example, some companies work with a lean employee base, and don’t have IT professionals with available bandwidth to engage in the training process. Other companies might choose managed services because they simply don’t have an inclination to manage within the cloud once they’re there. Still, others lean towards cloud managed services because they have already outsourced their applications and want to continue with that model, while some companies just don’t have the experience or the confidence to manage within the cloud.
In any of these types of cases, we provide and recommend managed services. Our managed services enable a company to operate and grow within the cloud, and through these services we become an extension of the business’ team.
There are some significant benefits to a company choosing the managed services model. First, their workloads in the cloud are never stagnant. Improvements are constantly made in order to maximize their investment. This includes optimizing the company’s footprint in the cloud, looking for best practices, and leveraging capabilities. As Microsoft’s Partner of the Year, we are on top of any changes or capabilities that may arise and can make recommendations very quickly and efficiently.
Another benefit is that because it’s an SaaS model, companies can take back the reins any time it makes sense. If there are new hires or changes within the business that would benefit from managing the cloud internally, the handoff is simple and seamless.
Whatever approach works best for you, whether it’s learning and managing on your own or engaging in cloud managed services, maximizing your investment and modernizing your workloads in Azure should be your top priority. We’re here to help.