Services
Beyond Cost Benefits:
Domain Expertise:
- Preemptive problem resolution: Anticipate a problem before the user brings it up. Integrated monitoring and management tools and advanced correlation tools can help achieve this and resolve problems in a faster, structured manner, reducing business losses due to IT downtime.
Quality: The infrastructure services provider is the specialist. It's his core business.
Best practices: Vendors work with multiple enterprises. There's a cross-pollination of ideas, learning and best practices.
Expertise: Increased automation with integrated tools provides a common framework for operations.
Visibility: Greater reporting and control—online tools provide CIOs with greater visibility, real-time control, plus historical reporting.
Scalability: Let the supplier absorb the peaks and troughs of manpower needs.
The SLAs: Tough, precise service-level agreements in black and white, with penalty clauses for downtime.
Specialists on tap 24x7: Businesses don't have to worry about hiring, training, retaining and retraining ERP, Unix, database, web and other experts.
Best practices: Vendors work with multiple enterprises. There's a cross-pollination of ideas, learning and best practices.
Expertise: Increased automation with integrated tools provides a common framework for operations.
Visibility: Greater reporting and control—online tools provide CIOs with greater visibility, real-time control, plus historical reporting.
Scalability: Let the supplier absorb the peaks and troughs of manpower needs.
The SLAs: Tough, precise service-level agreements in black and white, with penalty clauses for downtime.
Specialists on tap 24x7: Businesses don't have to worry about hiring, training, retaining and retraining ERP, Unix, database, web and other experts.
- Visibility and control: Remote infrastructure management makes visible the availability, performance and utilization of each component of your infrastructure. It gives you historical trend reports for capacity planning, root-cause reports for problem diagnosis and flash-check reports for availability status. You could do parts of this on your own, with internal or third-party tools. But it’s easier to measure services from an external supplier you're paying for—with the vendor's help—versus an internal process whose resources and costs may get hidden in your system. Moreover, the expertise and competence for such measurement is higher with a specialist vendor for whom this is the core business.
- Access to domain expertise: Your infrastructure might need Unix and Windows experts for systems, database experts, messaging experts, web administrators and ERP experts. They're expensive to recruit and retain. Training them to stay in sync with technology developments is an additional cost. By outsourcing to a specialist vendor, probably offshore, you get a ready base of skills from all of these sources whenever you need them.
- The quality edge: Processes are often not well defined in an in-house management environment. Variable engineer skills and approaches can mean random solutions. Most companies do not have defined escalation processes, a readily accessible knowledge base of errors and standard operating procedures. By outsourcing/offshoring infrastructure management, you can make sure that your vendor complies with processes defined by ITIL (IT Infrastructure Library) and BS7799 (also known as IS07799) for security. Well-defined ITIL-based processes ensure faster problem resolution.
