Business leaders today need to seriously look at their organizations, people, processes and procedures, to determine how well their current technology infrastructure is handling this new market environment. As more business is conducted digitally, managing the many aspects of a company’s technology stack has become increasingly complex.
Smart Business spoke with Benjamin Simms, Vice President of Blue Technologies Smart Solutions, about trends in managed IT and areas where businesses must adapt to stay competitive and protected.
What types of managed IT services are in demand?
Many companies want to mitigate cyberattacks. That’s done in part through regular software patching, updates, system monitoring and maintenance. Other services, such as backup and disaster recovery, have become increasingly popular. As threats such as ransomware disrupt more and more businesses, these softwares are needed so organizations can maintain the integrity and safety of their data.
Auditing and compliance are also becoming more popular as regulatory agencies enact policies designed to ensure data is kept secure. The level of expertise is becoming more pertinent to organizations to help them stay compliant to meet those technical standards.
An increasingly popular service is technology roadmaps and system design. These exercises lay out the game plan to leverage bigger and better technologies as they emerge, helping organizations stay protected from cyberattacks, as well as increase their competitiveness in the market.
Similarly, analytics and reporting are being used more to help organizations evaluate their network performance, among other key predictive indicators. These routine services provide an unbiased snapshot of a company’s workflows, common problems and areas of concern to identify areas for improvement.
What trends are emerging in managed IT?
While remote work is prevalent now, there are organizations that are struggling with that implementation, especially when it comes to infrastructure and adapting policies and procedures.
Organizations are increasingly leveraging cloud services in the new remote environment so that access can be granted to people working outside the office. This trend has led more organizations to leverage the services of the large cloud providers, which requires setup as well as security oversight.
In that same vein, subscription-based technologies have increased in popularity. Not only software as a service (SaaS), but there’s a lot more infrastructure that’s subscription based. Organizations can use these services to take advantage of a very predictable cost of goods and manner of operating.
The increase over the past few years in the number of mergers and acquisitions has created new gaps in technology as hardware, information and policies are brought together. This requires different skill sets blend those components without leaving gaps that negatively affect production or security.
How are these trends affecting business?
With the ramp up of the technology stack requirements needed to keep pace in today’s environment, businesses have more technology compliance to deal with to stay protected, stay competitive and stay compliant. All of these are affecting day-to-day business. A lack of technical expertise could be disastrous for an organization. By leveraging the managed IT services of a managed services provider (MSP), much of that work can be mitigated.
System design and technology roadmaps created by MSPs give organizations a snapshot of how they’re doing — if they’re secure or if there are gaps and challenges that they’re unaware of. That can help the C-suite understand where the organization is doing well, and where investment in improvements could be necessary. These services could also help the C-suite look at how they can lower their costs.
Doing everything internally can be a huge expense. With an MSP, organizations can increase the level of expertise and decrease their technology costs, which only helps organizations be just a bit more profitable and nimbler. ●
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