Earlier this week, Microsoft paid £5bn for Skype. According to the Microsoft press release, “The acquisition will increase the accessibility of real-time video and voice communications, bringing benefits to both consumers and enterprise users”.

There’s no doubt that Skype offers some fantastic functionality and many of us use it to keep in contact with friends and relatives from far afield. But how many of us use it for business and will that change?

From an IT infrastructure perspective, there are always things to be aware of with any VoIP system – it adds significant traffic to your internet line and while the cost of the application might be less expensive than traditional options, there will need to be an upgrade to SDSL or Leased Line to ensure the quality of each call is high. You can still tell when someone is on a Skype call and that will need to change.

There are also some security concerns – Skype gets through corporate firewalls when others can’t. Great if you are user.  Not so much if you trying to administer the IT and ensure it is secure.

But once these issues are resolved, there is no doubt that low-cost (or free) calling is a real benefit – especially between offices in different countries. Employees, clients and suppliers can instant message each other, reducing those long chain of emails that can often form part of the average workday.

And throw in some simple video-conferencing to reduce (although never eliminate) the need for face to face meetings and there are some compelling reasons to consider it.

There are plenty of VoIP systems out in the market which have these features and others have taken further steps to improve the quality of calls. 

And for a smaller office, with a decent internet connection, it’s worth keeping an eye on how Microsoft develops it’s new Skype division.

The VMware Cloud Solution

VMware’s cloud solution is based on VMware’s vSphere hypervisor platform. With VMware’s cloud model, customers create VMware virtual machines, which contain an operating system and one or more applications. These VMs run on VMware vCenter servers which are either hosted privately within a company’s data centre or publicly by one of VMware’s hosting partners. In addition, VMware provides an application marketplace where pre-configured VMs can be downloaded for use in a VMware-based compute cloud.

The Microsoft Cloud Solution 

Microsoft’s cloud solution is based on delivering services to the user through a flexible, easily managed infrastructure. There are two infrastructure models that Microsoft customers can use to implement cloud services: private cloud and public cloud. Customers can choose between these infrastructure models based on their application delivery needs, or they can combine the models to provide a flexible infrastructure of computing resources able to scale to changing service requirements.

The Fifosys Verdict

Fifosys have found VMware technologies to be more reliable, particularly in a clustered environment, and more economical in terms of memory and processor usage. Essentially, better performance and utilization lead to higher virtual machine consolidation ratios, which lead to lower capital expenditure costs.

Sam Taylor – Technical Director at Fifosys comments “Our final decision to move toward VMware was made due to the ease of use, installation, setup, reporting and support available from the VMware vSphere product. We recognised virtualisation becoming a large part on what Fifosys do going forward.”

50 guests from leading UK business attended the event at the prestigious Le Meridien Hotel in Piccadilly. It was an educational seminar aimed at giving business men and women the facts about how cloud computing can benefit their organisations. Mitesh Patel, the MD of Fifosys, gave the main presentation outlining the key information in this area, through the use of real life Fifosys client case studies. This was followed by an opportunity for networking.

Rory O’Shaughnessy, from Inside Job Ltd, a 20-man, office moving company, commented that it was “an informative evening together with very generous hospitality.”

The 3 articles, written by Mitesh, outline the benefits and risks associated with Cloud Computing as well as the advantages of a managed cloud solution.

Mitesh Patel says “We like the Cloud. Our clients like the Cloud. They like the way it offers fast, on-demand services without the need for long-term commitment in resources and applications.  They like the way it supports their mobile employees as well as office-based teams.  They like its flexibility and the opportunities for them to grow and enhance their IT services portfolio at low risk.  As we’re talking about properly-managed environments hosted by a reliable, expert supplier, we believe the Cloud can deliver some serious benefits to your business IT environment.”

Click here to read the 3 full articles Blue Sky Thinking on Cloud Computing

For more information or to arrange a meeting/interview with Mitesh, please contact Lauren Loubser-Bell on 0207 644 2610.

  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.

  The risks

Are there risks in the Cloud approach –
and what’s the risk for your business if you ignore the Cloud altogether?  
by Mitesh Patel,
managing director, Fifosys Limited

In part one of our series, we looked at the many benefits of the Cloud approach for your business.  We like the benefits – but what about any downside risks, where does the industry see the Cloud going in the next few years and should you ignore the Cloud for now? 

  
You may have seen suppliers emphasising cost-reduction as the primary driver for a Cloud environment. Now of course we’ll all vote for lower costs, but in our view there’s a caveat here: if a supplier is only focused on cost measures, we think that’s a risk in itself.  We consider the Cloud’s benefits as significantly more wide-ranging, but we also appreciate the perceived risks from an approach that some have dismissed as merely “IT resource-sharing”.  Obviously your confidential business information, your intellectual property, your client lists – effectively your competitive edge – are not resources you would want to share!

So can a Cloud environment deliver the protection you want for your confidential business data?  Certainly it can – and we appreciate it’s important for you to be certain that you retain ownership of your data and that it will always be encrypted ‘for your eyes only’.  Your supplier should be able to demonstrate how their servers and applications are compartmentalised for your data.

The key message for protecting your business information, however, is that no matter where your data sits, whether it’s on your own computers in the office next to you or in a data centre miles away, all these machines need to be connected to the Internet and all need appropriate access security and firewalls.  The proximity of hardware to your business’s physical location will not of itself improve the safety or integrity of your data.  In fact, given the level of specialised physical security and access controls in the data centres we work with, we’d contend that data is probably safer there than anywhere else.

What about “access-anywhere”?  The concept sounds great for your business, enabling you and your employees to access your systems from any office, on the road or at home.  Is there a risk, though, that providing such ‘open’ access options can compromise the security of your systems or increase pressure on firewalls?  As with the previous point about data confidentiality, access-anywhere also depends on Internet connectivity. Therefore the speed and quality of the service depends on that final line connection into the offices where your computers are housed.  That’s your weakest link!  Realistically, delivering the bandwidth you need into your office could be a lot more expensive for your business than tapping into the comms infrastructures of a data centre that is custom-designed from the outset to handle significant levels of two-way data traffic.

Lastly, does a Cloud environment risk compromising visibility – literally knowing where your data is as well as being able to maintain a view across all of it?  When it comes to physical location, we appreciate that business owners want to know where their data is held and many will be required to know, for regulatory reasons.  We are always able to tell our clients where their data is stored.  It may be a Cloud environment, but it’s grounded on terra firma as far as we are concerned….. Moreover, all our clients are hosted in one of two centres in Maidenhead or Milton Keynes, which delivers the additional reassurance that our computers are based in the UK.

   
Far from restricting data views, we believe the Cloud approach can in fact enhance end-to-end visibility across your business data operations and performance, which in turn can help you improve customer service and quality at minimal cost.

So is the Cloud the future….?

 
Looks like it….a recent EU report into the opportunities for European Cloud Computing says that the Cloud has proven to be a major commercial success over recent years and will play a major role in the ICT domain over the next 10 years or more.  The report concludes that “future systems will exploit the capabilities of managed services and resource provisioning further”.

Analyst reports include forecasts that that the worldwide market for Cloud services in 2013 will be $44.2bn, with the European market ranging from €971m in 2008 to €6,005m in 2013 and 12% of the worldwide software market going to the Cloud.

 
… or should we watch from a distance and ultimately ignore?

The industry has clearly taken to the Cloud so what, then, are the risks of sitting this one out? When we assess the impacts for our clients of ignoring the Cloud, key factors include the continuing requirements for localised maintenance, sustaining power and bandwidth levels and keeping systems and skills up to date.  Most significant, though, is the growing demand for remote access to support the flexible working patterns and distributed mode of business operations that characterise the 24×7 global village.  For your business, this means being able to provide the right level of access for your employees in a secure, controlled (and controllable) manner.

Operationally, there are risks for you as a business in maintaining a single-site IT infrastructure.  You have the costs involved in protecting the environment locally.  You need to maintain arrangements with local engineers to ensure stability of your environment or maintain and develop the skills of your own in-house technical team. Having your own teams responsible for managing the infrastructure, application updates and all appropriate licensing arrangements means your in-house support specialists effectively represent a further single point of failure risk that you need to manage and mitigate.  Contracting other local suppliers can reduce your resourcing risk but means you need to manage multiple relationships and service level agreements.

 
Keith Foster, a business consultant who advises across a wide range of sectors, sums it up when he says “If companies ignore Cloud computing, a major risk is that they forego opportunities that their competitors take advantage of.  Moreover, there are no end of risks associated with small to medium sized companies trying to run their own computing services, particularly lack of security and lack of skills.”

All things considered – our view

Our experience shows that businesses have accepted risks unknowingly or knowingly simply as a result of the investment they have put into their IT environments. The bigger question, we believe, is why would anyone want the responsibility of running a non-core service in-house for something that they will struggle to manage, update and control?

 
So we say: don’t ignore the Cloud!  If you do, your IT will cost you more than it needs to – and you will have to continue accepting the risks of failure, limiting the operational efficiency for your staff and limiting the expansion potential for your business. Those risks, in our view, are the ones not worth taking…

 
Moreover, with a range of suppliers for different aspects of your IT services, who manages the growth and expansion of your data with all the associated security, integrity and capacity planning implications? In that disparate environment, who helps you develop a coherent strategy going forward?  We’ll examine the strategy approach of managed services and managed hosting environments in more depth in the next article in our series….

What happened

Early on Wednesday 31st March 2010, BT issued an announcement:  “Following flooding at a BT exchange in the Paddington area, customers in parts of North and West London may be experiencing a loss of broadband and/or telephone service. Customers in other parts of the country may also be affected.”

Pretty innocuous sounding, but what happened next?

When phone lines within London, and by some accounts all across the country, stopped working, it wasn’t just phone calls that were affected. Indeed, switching to mobiles made that a low impact issue.

But phone lines are used for so much more than conversations. When cash points tried to get approval for someone withdrawing money, they couldn’t, and the ATMs were shut down.  The same happened with PDQ machines for people trying to use a credit card in shops.

By noon, SagePay, one of the UK’s largest online payment processing systems, were saying: “Please be advised Lloyds Cardnet and Halifax Bank of Scotland customers are currently unable to process transactions via the Sage Pay gateway.”  So, websites across the UK stopped being able to take money.

And given the 31st March may well have been pay day for many, how many companies couldn’t contact the bank electronically to make that payment?

Although we all enjoy the benefits of an interconnected world, sometimes there are risks.

A bit too much water and a business’s trading for the last day of their financial year is interrupted.

What is the loss of business this one fault caused?

Did it cause your business issues? 

As we rely so heavily of BT’s network, surely it’s sensible to use technology to give ourselves that “work from home” option?

How often do we consider the impact of what we take for granted failing?

One area of significant development is hosting core areas of the back end IT infrastructure and services.  Hosting solutions have been available for over 15 years but required the brand name of ‘Cloud Computing’ to suddenly be considered as a serious subject of discussion.

All of a sudden this brand name has turned into the so called new IT buzz word for 2010.

Whilst traditionally hosting was more considered an easy low investment option for SME’s, this is now applicable to all organisations due to the benefits that include: 

1. Consolidation of physical server hardware, leading to a reduction in warranty renewal costs, space and power
2. Software applications payable on a per user per month basis, thereby reducing the upfront CAPEX costs
3. Removes the risks associated with a single site failure
4. Reduces the investment required for Disaster Recovery
5. Allows systems to be easily restored in the event of a significant hardware and software failure 
6. Allows multiple sites to grow with ease
7. Central point of administration
8. Reduces the number of personnel in the IT team
9. Removes the need to up skill in house IT teams to manage an outsourced hosted environment
10. Puts the responsibility in the hands of the managed hosting provider

To ensure organisations make the right decision, IT must be thought about at a strategic level with clear business objectives defined at the outset. By failing to take IT seriously at a senior level,  organisations could miss out on the continual technology improvements that can deliver clear business benefit from a management, administration and collaboration perspective.

Yet, while it’s “obvious” to business owners, when we talk to them, that they don’t need all their business information instantly to hand all day every day, that “obvious” truth doesn’t always translate into their data management and storage activities. 

It’s why we see so many businesses paying over the odds to back up huge volumes of data on a continuous basis, without prioritising it according to how they use it and how quickly they would need it back.  It’s why we hear so many business owners saying data backup is the preserve of their IT manager and all they know is that their data is backed up daily, stored “somewhere” and (hopefully) someone in the office knows how to retrieve it if needed. 

And it’s why so many of our clients have recently started asking for our help to transform what we call “random acts of storage” into a coherent, customised data management and retrieval policy. 

Developing a data management strategy that works for your business starts with assessing and categorising the data you use and manage, identifying what you need for day-to-day operations and which files you can archive for longer or manage without for longer. 

Some people have a natural ‘belt-and-braces’ instinct and want a copy of everything retained off-site.  When you examine the true business need, however, you may find that they don’t necessarily ever need to have it all back immediately should they lose access to it locally.  On the other hand, we’ve come across people who are potentially TOO relaxed about the security of their business data.  One client told us he wasn’t that bothered because he ‘assumed’ his accountant would store all their accounts and tax files, his solicitor ‘probably’ kept copies of contracts and legal papers and his suppliers ‘surely must have copies of orders from us’.  Wonder if he ever checked with all those other companies – or indeed if they appreciate his reliance on their data storage policies?  Such eternal optimism isn’t typical of most business owners – and we’d usually recommend a slightly more pragmatic and responsible approach when it comes to taking responsibility for your own business data…  

Once the key parameters are defined for all aspects of your business, these imperatives drive your backup strategy.  That way, we make sure that your critical data is prioritised both for recovery and your business continuity. As we always remind every client, deciding what information should be backed up is first and foremost a business decision, not an IT option. 

And at Fifosys, we don’t just advise and support. Working so closely with clients in different sectors to develop tailored plans for data management, we were constantly asked to recommend appropriate product solutions and to manage the whole process. So we recently launched Fortress™, an automated, Cloud-based full-service backup and recovery solution designed specifically to meet the needs of small and medium sized (SME) businesses.  We see Fortress™ as integral to our portfolio of IT outsourcing solutions. It gives you a cost-effective, secure service to safeguard your business-critical data, with the confidence and certainty of rapid information restore if the worst happens.  

Fortress™ is simple to install, delivered via the Cloud and stored securely in UK data centres, and manages your information through its full lifecycle from discovery, off-site backup and archiving to appropriate data destruction.  Once your initial data set is backed up, only changes and additions are backed up subsequently, which dramatically reduces the volume of data sent into storage via the Cloud – and of course your continuing costs.  Central to the Fortress™ value proposition for business is its effective compression and de-duplication technology which optimises storage space and therefore the overall cost-effectiveness of the service.
So I go back to my original question and the instinctive reaction of so many business owners: “everyone knows” that not all information is the same.  So how much data are YOU storing?  How much do you add to it and how often?  How effectively is YOUR business information categorised, prioritised and organised in relation to your backup, archiving, recovery and retrieval facilities?  Are your business imperatives driving your data backup strategy – or is it the other way round? 

Random acts of storage?  Not if we can help it….

Mitesh Patel, managing director of IT managed services provider Fifosys, believes that SME organisations that outsource their IT and, most importantly, their director-level management and reporting, enjoy the luxury of never having to discuss IT issues in the Boardroom.

Utilitarian IT
As IT has become a fundamental component of a business’ sustained success, SME organisations have actually downgraded their IT focus. Paradoxically, rather than take a strategic approach to IT development and enhancement, with board level commitment and clear measurement of return on investment, the majority of SMEs now take a rather utilitarian approach to IT.

Financial Directors regularly sign off the IT budget with limited  idea of how it is being spent or whether it is delivering value. With key decisions left in the hands of inexperienced, mid-tier personnel and no justification of spend; organisations are actually wasting upwards of 70% of the annual IT budget. Worse, they are completely unaware of the level of business risk incurred on a daily basis through inappropriate IT deployments.

With this lackadaisical attitude to IT, it is little wonder that technology becomes a board level issue only as a result of a major disaster – from serious downtime to the theft of key customer data and business loss.

Abdicating Responsibility
Yet twenty years ago the discussion of IT at board level was a given. Organisations of every size recognised the importance of technology in achieving competitive advantage. So why has IT been downgraded? Why do so few SMEs have a dedicated IT Director or, at least, a board level representative prepared to place IT centre stage on a regular basis?

By failing to take IT seriously at a senior level these organisations are missing out on the continual technology improvements that can deliver clear business benefit from a management, administration and collaboration perspective. Furthermore, by relying on IT personnel who have often been promoted to a title that far outstrips their job description or experience level, they are failing to access new skills or understand market developments.

The result? An IT budget that fails to reflect the core business drivers and an IT infrastructure that contributes to significant business risk. Any member of the IT team can create a technology wish list, citing the opportunities to exploit new functionality or the need to improve business continuity. But who is cross checking this wish list? Where are the senior personnel looking to ensure that these technology investments will enable strategic direction or demanding proof that investment in business continuity is delivering a lower risk business model?

By abdicating board level responsibility SMEs are culpable – they are risking the business and wilfully wasting essential resources on unnecessary and unfocused IT investments.

Virtual IT Director
Of course it is the traditional role of an IT Director to set a coherent, affordable IT strategy and then manage its implementation and on-going delivery. The role requires broad skills and experience to oversee the procurement process, set realistic budgets, interpret the results and drive the business forward.

However, in any organisation with fewer than 250 employees it is hard to justify employing full time an experienced Director with the appropriate skills. Instead, where it exists, the role is likely to be filled by a long term member of staff who is still responsible for day to day support tasks and does not have the ear or appreciation of the board.

As a result, growing numbers of SMEs are considering the value of a virtual IT Director or outsourced IT Director function. Offering budgeting advice and director level business-based planning, this external resource should provide organisations with access to the latest skills, experience of delivering strategic IT direction across a range of industries and proven capabilities for overseeing successful IT implementation with quantifiable ROI.

Beware, however, of the virtual IT Director offering no more than a new IT strategic direction and a plan. An IT Director can have been in place for 25 years – but the experience is limited by technology exposure. Furthermore, these individuals are typically providing no more than a lengthy report advising on possible direction. There is no follow up, no ability to implement the strategy, facilitate procurement or measure the ROI.

Therefore, unless someone at board level is prepared to take full responsibility for implementing the recommendations, which is improbable, this will become an expensive exercise that delivers no real business value.

Measured Success
An outsourced IT Director function, in contrast, provides an organisation with access to a team of people, all with broad technology and industry experience. And it is this breadth of technology exposure that is key to creating a relevant strategic IT direction that truly maps the business drivers.

Furthermore, the role of the outsourced IT Director function is not simply to provide advice and guidance but also to support the business in achieving its technology goals. From creating the IT change management programme to overseeing budgeting, procurement and implementation, a key component of the role is proof of delivery. On-going measurement and reporting is essential to demonstrate the value of the investment and highlight any emerging areas of risk.

For example, why invest heavily in business continuity solutions without then testing to prove the business risk has been reduced? A virtual IT Director may recommend the company build in redundancy to ensure maximum downtime on the Exchange server is reduced from 24 to four hours. But without implementing and then testing that implementation to prove it works, where is the strategic value? It is by proving the IT strategy works that an outsourced IT Director function delivers quantifiable ROI to the business.

Conclusion
Too many organisations have taken IT for granted over the past 10 years. As a result, they have underinvested systematically, resulting in an IT infrastructure that is creaking at the seams, inappropriate for today’s business needs and creating significant risk of failure.

Taking a strategic approach to IT is not necessarily about spending more money. Indeed, in many cases much of the existing IT budget is being incorrectly allocated; while an outsourced IT Director function can cost as little as £30,000 a year. Nor is it simply an opportunity to appoint a corporate scapegoat to take the blame for any problems.

It is about leveraging strong IT Director skills to provide businesses with a clear understanding of the IT risk and to create a relevant IT change management programme for the next one, three, even five years to reflect business goals.

Critically, it is about putting in place an organisation that takes responsibility for both defining and delivering a strategic approach to IT that minimises risk and provides real corporate value – and takes IT off the board agenda.