Servicing the Decentralized Digital World
With the decentralized workplace quickly evolving into a common model, the demand for remote services, solutions, and connectivity is growing. Now that most companies are empowered by digital technology to reach a more global talent pool, it makes sense that they seek remote IT solutions to maintain infrastructure health and provide continuous, uninterrupted business services.
Remote IT Services: What Are They, and How Do They Work?
When we think of remote IT solutions, we may imagine IT technicians in a certain location who respond to and resolve technical difficulties for a client in a different location. While this is certainly one kind of remote IT service that many companies opt for to serve their day-to-day IT needs, the nature of remote IT is evolving with the advent of the decentralized enterprise.
Remote IT solutions encompass anything from IT support to end-to-end and comprehensive managed IT package handled by a managed services provider (MSP) in a different geographical location. Depending on your enterprise’s IT needs, varying levels of services may be able to address them.
The most popular and widely recognized form of remote IT – remote support – is conducted by technicians who gain access to the client enterprise’s systems via a web-based application or remote access program. This kind of support solution can address and resolve many common IT issues immediately.
If your enterprise needs more thorough, constant support, however, you should consider investing in a remote IT management solution, to remove the IT burden from your team’s shoulders. A remote managed services provider can monitor your entire datacenter resources such as servers, workstations, business services and network components, plus install and maintain updates, manage software patches, and backup your files in case of a data disaster. All of this in addition to providing access to support technicians, both on and offsite.
The Benefits of Remote IT
Whichever remote IT route you choose for your organization, there are several advantages to outsourcing your IT management to an external services provider. The first and most obvious is that it allows you to refocus your priorities onto your enterprise’s business goals as opposed to spending mental effort and resources on infrastructure and network issues.
Secondly, partnering with a remote managed services provider can significantly reduce your IT budget while gaining highly reliable infrastructure management services. Having access to technicians who are available at all times to monitor your systems, install software updates, and resolve issues quickly will ensure that inconveniences rarely reach the customer and taint their experience.
The fact that the technicians or remote MSP team does not have to be physically on the scene also drives IT spending down by passing the cost savings down to the customer through lower operational and incidental costs.
Furthermore, the reliability of remote MSPs and IT support solutions, with their ability to safely monitor, update, and back systems up constantly from afar, empowers companies to expand their talent potential to a global pool of diverse human resources with a wide variety of skills.
Things to consider when evaluating remote IT service providers
Though there are many benefits to engaging remote IT management and support, there are a few complicating factors that should be considered before investing in a solution. First of all, there is an advantage to having a technician spend time at a location, as it increases their familiarity with a company’s IT infrastructure and enables them to address issues more thoroughly and quickly.
Businesses that deal with a significant amount of sensitive or private information may also be cautious when approaching remote services, as there may be security concerns.
New on the Scene: Transformative Application Management (TAM)
Any discussion of managed IT service providers is not complete without discussing scalable change and outright digital transformation. In our experience over the years, we have seen that significant portions of IT spend go towards "Run" activities which limits spending on "Change." It’s not unusual to see as much as 65% of spending going toward "Run."
Application management is often outsourced to a vendor who may not be incented to make improvements to the application, automating the support provided, or giving visibility to the client. MSPs don’t want to lose this revenue stream and therefore don't push for change. Clients may expect management costs to decrease over time, but they rarely do.
A valuable opportunity exists here, however. Transforming application management delivers two big steps forward in your digital transformation journey. The first step is to provide a highly automated and streamlined experience to customers and employees who interact with IT applications. New technology like application monitoring, DevOps, automation, analytics, and AIOps all can have a major financial impact.
Through this reduction of the cost of application management, the all-important second step happens: Funds are freed up for other transformational activities.
Trianz’ TAM offering has gained significant traction through delivering benefits like:
Reduce demand for application management
Reduced Cost for application management
Faster response time to issues
Teams more ready for digital transformation
Improved business continuity
Maximize Your Business Potential
Despite the potential drawbacks to remote IT support services, the advantages are numerous. Sharing the responsibility of IT management with a remote partner firm allows your organization to focus more on business impact, continuity, expansion, and transformation.
