Off-Site Services / Sponsor

The Benefits of Off Site Services

Cost is the obvious place to start as it is usually at the top of any company agenda. On the surface, the off site services model sounds like an expensive business, so often CIOs are wary of the associated costs. In fact, the figures can be extremely attractive. Good management of IT infrastructure requires specialist skills, and when a job is a dull maintenance task that has never been subjected to the right degree of scrutiny, you need the best expertise available to do the job properly.

Short term solutions to these tasks don’t come cheap, and skilled personnel are often hard to find. Businesses are experiencing increasing costs of recruiting and retaining skills specific to storage, backup, virtualisation, and security. The OSS providers have already invested heavily in specialist consultants who have the expertise and time to dedicate to managing client infrastructure and can act as a complementary service to the existing IT department.

Off site services providers live and breathe their specialities and when critical problems arise your OSS expert will have ‘seen it all before’. OSS consultants have a greater depth of capabilities than single end user organisations because they have dealt with problems in all areas, in many industries and with any scale of deployment.

Virtualisation is a prime example of the need for specific expertise. Most organisations know the value of server virtualisation and many companies have also adopted it across test, development and production. Few, however, have the in-house tools, resources and skills sets to manage it effectively.

In this economic climate in particular, many businesses are asking the question: is it more valuable to adopt an expert support model rather than dedicate precious full time employees to working on low value ongoing operations, as opposed to the projects that will optimise the organisation’s efficiency and save it money? It’s usually more effective to utilise in-house skills for revenue generating projects and invest in OSS, whilst limiting the need to hire and train new resources.

Sweating Assets

Storage and Backup Storage environments are notoriously hard to manage effectively whilst gauging provisioning, capacity planning and accurate service levels. The OSS model can help businesses create savings in this area by maximising the utilisation of existing assets. For example, storage provisioning and capacity planning will be managed on an ongoing basis, meaning that utilisation can be maximised and storage space reclaimed before there is a need to purchase new arrays.

The service provider is also able to accurately forecast future capacity based on historical patterns. After any changes are made, further monitoring also allows you to check the success of a solution to see if running as expected. In addition, round the clock monitoring allows bottlenecks to be quickly and easily identified to increase the ability to load balance existing resources to optimise the IT environment.

Additional benefits for the storage and back up environment include increased data protection levels; streamlined compliance through pre-configured reports for passing both internal SLA’s and external compliance audits.

Virtualisation

Because Off site services teams have practical, hands-on experience in virtual environments, organisations using OSS can rely on their expertise to make full use of the virtualised systems as soon as they are rolled out. This can reduce the time-to-go-live by months, so realising the ROI sooner. Virtualisation experts manage day-to-day operations so clients can focus on aligning the business with IT service delivery capabilities for maximum impact and value.

Security

Buying expert services for security provides businesses with continual vulnerability scanning and analysis, reducing the time, effort, and in-house skill requirements for identifying and remediating vulnerabilities that could lead to security breaches in the IT environment. This provides a layer of protection from the constantly evolving security threat environment.

Conclusion

OSS brings predictability, visibility and manageability into IT environments to control costs, reduce risk and improve service levels. The model also allows businesses to take full advantage of the technologies they have already invested in – such as virtualisation – to ensure their environment is running optimally and saving costs. Some are seeing OSS as a remedy purely for hard times, but after the swell has gained momentum, we are likely to see that the model is here to stay.

David Leyland is UK OSS Business Manager at GlassHouse Technologies