Continuing our series of articles demystifying Cloud Computing and identifying the value proposition the Cloud can deliver for your business

  Why managed services are critical
 to the success of your Cloud investment
by Mitesh Patel,
managing director, Fifosys Limited

When a business owner or director comes to me for help with their IT strategy, the first thing I want to know is: how do you make money?  To me, understanding where that company is profitable, or why it isn’t, is the key to being able to recommend the IT solutions and services that will really work for the business.  Many years of that type of direct relationship with clients across many different types of industry means I can really say that we understand our clients’ businesses.  Why is that important?  It’s because I know that the biggest concern for any CEO considering managed services options is “How much of my business do you understand?”

   
Understanding the client’s business isn’t a one-off exercise either.  Becoming a trusted advisor means making sure that their IT strategy keeps pace with their business strategy, supports peaks and troughs in  demand and enables them to integrate new products and applications as their business grows or changes.  It also means understanding the role the directors want to take in respect of their IT environment.

 
I meet with Boards of Directors who will tell me: “IT isn’t our business. We don’t want to know the detail because we’re not technical. We want to engage the experts who DO know about it. We want you to take charge of it and make it your problem, not ours. That’s why you’re here.”

 
And I meet with other Boards of Directors who say: “We want to know all about our IT. Teach us everything about it.  Bring in your experts and teach our people. That’s why you’re here.”

  
Of course we are happy to support both those positions and, while they might seem to be contrasting, they have a consistent underlying theme: the right IT solutions are the ones that support their business in a flexible, low-risk, scalable and cost-effective manner.  This goes to the heart of managed services and why they are so important to helping you derive maximum benefits from your Cloud investment.

Simply put, whether you’re investing in a Cloud-based environment or a full on-premise solution, you still need to manage those services.  The critical success factors are, from the IT perspective, managing the environment so that it provides a robust and resilient infrastructure and then, from the business viewpoint, enabling and supporting change. 
Step one is determining your strategy for an IT and applications infrastructure that will support where you want your business to go.  Once you know that, how much do you want (or need) to resource, train and maintain an in-house IT team?  And once you know that, how many different suppliers, service contracts and integration arrangements do you want to deal with?

     
Your company may be at Step One and want help there.  Or you may be further down the line, with service and applications infrastructures built up and enhanced over many years, but now find you have disparate systems, each with its own security, integrity and capacity planning implications. Regardless of the complexity or maturity of your IT environment, Cloud-based managed services can deliver significant benefits.  The key is to work with a trusted advisor and to be realistic about your options.

 
As one business advisor said to us recently, “The Cloud can only help to optimise the IT spend for many companies once they recognise the standardisation and commoditisation of basic IT infrastructure – and therefore appreciate the value of managed services to their business.  The main problem we are seeing is where companies are taking the rubbish they have in their business and sending it to a hosting facility in the hope that it will suddenly be better…”  This is where domain knowledge and industry insight comes to the fore in being able to carry out detailed assessments of business information before we would recommend a managed services solution.

We also find a few misconceptions arising time and again:

All or nothing?

 
Firstly, some business owners and IT managers believe that managed services demands an ‘all or nothing’ commitment, where moving to the Cloud means handing over everything they are doing and dispensing with all their IT skills.  Let’s debunk that straightaway.  Certainly if you want to hand over all your systems and applications, we can arrange that for you, and if you’d like to get shot of your people, that’s up to you too – but neither of those are pre-requisites of the Cloud or a managed services environment!

 
You can take any level of hosted and managed environment you want, from a single piece of software through to a fully outsourced service.  And even that doesn’t have to mean there’s nothing left within your own business.  Depending on your business needs, a hybrid solution may be the most appropriate, combining both on-premise and cloud-based strategies.

Suitability

Secondly, some early assessments of the Cloud as a hosting environment may have created the inaccurate impression that it is primarily of benefit only for non-critical applications. Again we can debunk that: many companies have moved highly business-critical applications into the Cloud.  CRM, for example, in different forms can be business-critical and works well in a Cloud environment, as have back-office, supply chain management or production management applications. 

Shock of the new? Not any more

Thirdly, we think a Cloud-based managed services environment gives you more choice, not less.  We’ve looked at the benefits and the risks in our previous articles in this series, and we’ve discussed some of the concerns about outsourcing such as perceived lack of control.  However, the majority of companies outsource part of their IT already, even if they don’t think of it in that way, for example in the purchase of software that in the past would have been custom-built.  Nowadays, your first thought wouldn’t be to look for a programmer: you would research what the market has ready-made and customise it to your business.  The same approach should apply to managed services, appreciating that the Cloud has simply enabled additional flexibility and scalability in that environment.

  
In particular, if your company has a catalyst for change, such as moving offices or buying another company, Cloud-based solutions can play an important role in managing and enabling those transitions.  Trusted providers should be able to compare and contrast both on-premise and cloud-based solutions, with ROI and implementation analysis so you know the range of options.

   
All things considered: our view

From the simplest hardware solution, where a basic managed environment will give you access to “a server in a rack” or some dedicated space in a data centre, if that’s all you need that’s fine – but are you deriving real business benefit from that arrangement?  Whatever you have still needs an element of managing, unless you are completely happy with the product exactly as it came out of the box or you have the range of in-house skills available to customise and adapt what you’ve bought.  With each element of your infrastructure you can have a separate Buyer Support Agreement and deal individually with vendors or resellers, or you can find a company that takes care of everything for you.

 As a trusted advisor to many companies, after assessing the type of business they do and the type and volumes of data they use, transfer, store and archive, we will say what we believe are the best (and best value) options. Ultimately the decision comes down to how much day-to-day management responsibility you can – and want – to maintain in-house.

As Elliot Zissman, our marketing director, says:  “In my view, managed services in a Cloud-based environment is basically what the Internet was invented for.  It gives us an enhanced delivery model to offer our customers and they in turn have an improved cost and flexibility model which can help them become more competitive.  Surely that way everyone benefits.”

And finally, always remember the question I’m coming to ask you: how do you make money? From your answers, we can show you how managed services can support where your business is – or can be – most successful.