IT resources are often pulled in several directions, with more time spent on the ongoing maintenance and monitoring of the core IT infrastructure in place than they would prefer. Projects that would position the company for more profitability or greater efficiency are not always achieved in a desired time frame.
Smart Business spoke to Carlos Oliveira, vice president of engineering and Irvine general manager at Latisys, to help define the business benefits of off-loading routine IT services to a provider of managed services, and what to look for in an IT off-load solution.
How does IT off-load differ from off-site and how does a firm know when it is ready to transition?
IT off-load solutions, which are designed to enhance the performance, reliability and security of an organization’s core IT infrastructure, are delivered as fully managed services so an organization’s internal resources can focus on strategic IT initiatives and critical server infrastructure.
IT off-load solutions allow organizations to better control their hardware, system and personnel costs by alleviating tactical day-to-day management operations and converting the capital dollars needed to procure these technologies into operational expenses for the services.
The IT off-load profile enables an organization to build upon the robust infrastructure provided in the off-site profile by leveraging IT staff from the data center provider for the maintenance and monitoring necessary to fully support the infrastructure.
The following are characteristics of organizations that fit within the IT off-load profile:
- Human resources constraints within the IT organization
- Internal or regulatory requirements to maintain full control of compute resources within the infrastructure
- Subject matter expertise gaps within the IT knowledge base
- Massive data growth that exceeds capital availability
What specific applications and services can an enterprise leverage with off-load?
Commonly leveraged managed services include:
- High-performance primary storage
- Enterprise data backup
- Firewall
- Load balancing
- Site-to-site and client-to-site VPN
- Intrusion detection
Additionally, IT organizations can leverage a team of highly trained network and system engineers to validate and escalate issues within their IT infrastructure, improving the signal-to-noise ratio of monitoring activities and reducing fatigue and workload from key internal IT personnel.
