| Imagine this scenario: your staff is down one more person this week than you originally planned, you have a growing list of project deadlines that need to be addressed, and you don’t have the necessary IT resources or manpower to deliver the time-to-value that your customers demand. Sound familiar? |
With a lot of small and medium-sized (SMB) businesses, this scenario is an everyday reality. They are typically strapped from a cost standpoint to expand their IT staff—if they have a staff at all. Having the right people to assist is a big differentiator for curbing mistakes. In fact, Gartner projects that through 2015 people will be responsible for 80% of all technology failures. This can be due to a variety of reasons, including not having a realistic workload plan in place or underestimating how much labor is needed to prevent these problems from taking place.
To reduce management complexity while keeping costs down, SMBs need the ability to do more using fewer resources, and that’s where managed services has turned into a viable option. With a managed services provider, businesses can either gain timely assistance to augment an overworked staff or have a full-blown IT department at their disposal. Either way, managed services can help bridge the gaps.
The SMB market is definitely catching on. According to Techaisle, the SMB Managed Services market is projected to grow to $44 billion until 2016, at a rate of roughly 12% growth in that span. Of particular note is that remote management monitoring services will increase to $15 billion during the same timeframe.
Managed Services can help SMBs:
- Free up resources that are tied up in IT labor for more impactful business planning and decision-making
- Enlist the aid of managed service providers (MSPs) that have experience helping other like businesses
- Can provide access and scaling to the latest technology at a reduce cost
- Gain financing and leasing options to alleviate the need for large, upfront investments
What are Managed IT Services, Managed Services, Remote Monitor and Remediation, Remote IT Solutions, Help Desk Network Support Services? So many terms…
A new study from CPU maker, AMD, shows that over one third, 37%, of companies are now using cloud infrastructure for their data centers with an additional 43% of companies investigating implementation. And this isn’t just small companies who are relying on the power of cloud technology, with 63% of those using the cloud saying that they have data stored in there worth over $250,000, meaning billions of dollars worth of information is now sitting securely off-site.
Cloud computing has been growing over the past couple of years, and has increased with the wide spread of virtualization allowing companies to scale their IT department easier and more efficiently. 1 in 10 companies are now storing over 10 million dollars in the cloud now, but there is still concerns from security experts who point out that are still some flaws that have come to light recently with companies like Sony having their servers hacked and Amazon’s cloud service going down for an extended period of time leaving many companies unable to access their information. While security was still sited as the number one concern when moving to a cloud infrastructure, these flaws in the cloud computing model haven’t deterred companies from moving to the cloud, having the benefits of accessing their information from anywhere and allowing companies to outsource certain IT tasks to an outside company.
Xerox has been undergoing lots of changes over the past few years, with CEO Ursula Burns heading the helm for the past 2 years, she has changed Xerox from the inside out in hopes to transform them from just a printer/toner manufacturer, into a more diverse IT provider that utilizes the Partner Channel.
