IT infrastructure management doesn’t elbow its way onto too many “Top 10 hot and trendy” lists, but it’s not for lack of impact. It’s more important than ever in today’s furiously evolving technical environment and forms one of the backbone competencies that supports every successful business. Whether it comes from in-house staff or an outside team of experts, a cost-efficient, flexible and scalable infrastructure model allows a company to respond to market conditions quickly, enhance operational efficiencies, elevate performance and drive growth.
Forward-looking companies increasingly look to outside managed services providers for the key to effective IT infrastructure, for good reason. The outsourced model also helps internal IT departments in four important ways:
Takes a Load Off
In-house IT departments have numerous responsibilities and are under enormous pressure, especially when navigating the trials of growth and expansion. Rather than marching along with a strained staff and hoping for the best, or incurring the expense of recruiting and training additional personnel, offloading some of your IT workload to a managed services carrier can help to optimize your IT team’s performance while giving them the support they need.
Adds Expertise on Demand
Most IT professionals are aware of the latest innovations in enterprise technology, but even the best can’t be experts at everything. Advancements occur too quickly and dramatically. This makes growth, expansion and change fundamental in most IT departments. One of the key benefits of leveraging managed services, like those provided by TPx, is the breadth of expertise that comes with it. Your IT staff gets on-demand access to IT specialists and resources that often are unavailable internally.
Reduces Risk
Cybercriminals are attacking organizations of all sizes more than ever and experts predict the problem will intensify in the future. Providers of managed services have the latest technologies and tools designed to protect your network and data. In the case of TPx, these are backed up by a state-of-the-art security operations center (SOC) and a team of security specialists with deep military and intelligence backgrounds.
Making things even easier on your IT department, TPx also offers a Unified Threat Management (UTM) solution that consolidates network security – including firewalls with anti-virus and anti-spyware protection, intrusion detection and prevention, gateway anti-spam, content filtering, load balancing, data loss prevention and on-appliance reporting – into a comprehensive and dynamic threat prevention solution.
Supports the New IT Paradigm
Today, technology is a critical ingredient to organizational success, and IT is becoming the tip of the spear in enabling new customer experiences and revenue streams, as well as employee productivity and satisfaction. Marketing and sales departments, in particular, are increasingly leaning on IT departments to help improve business outcomes. When IT personnel are bogged down in increasingly complex “routine” maintenance activities, they don’t have the time to focus on proprietary technologies and processes that can develop proprietary advantages and fuel company growth.
Managed IT services used to be a tough sell with IT managers who feared the outsourced model would displace their teams. But they’re increasingly seeing providers of managed services as partners, not replacements and, ultimately, good medicine for recasting their departments from perceived cost centers into powerful engines for solving modern business challenges.
About the Author
Matt Mair is a Senior Product Marketing Manager for ITx Managed Services. His role includes marketing and communications for TPx’s suite of managed IT offerings including Managed SD-WAN, LAN Monitoring, Office 365, Workstation and Servers Management, Colocation and Server Backup solutions. Matt holds an MBA from Michigan State University’s Broad School of Business and resides in Los Angeles.