Managed Services Help Take Advantage of IT Innovation - TechSource

All agencies must manage to a budget, but in today’s hyperconnected and quickly evolving world of IT, this is increasingly difficult. That’s why so many agencies are looking to partners for managed services as a way to innovative IT solutions without investing millions or more in infrastructure that will become obsolete in a few years.

Managed services allows organizations to move to a consumption-based IT strategy, offering agility, flexibility and access to the best in IT innovations. When an agency finds a trusted managed services provider, it can quickly adopt a particular technology without worrying about the overall complexity or having the right skill set to manage the technology in-house.

The optimal words here are “trusted… provider,” of course. To find that trusted partner, an agency should ask potential partners a few pertinent questions:

• Do you have the domain expertise in the particular technology our agency wants to deploy?
• Can you support the full lifecycle of this technology?
• Can you deploy a solution, maintain it, provide helpdesk support and help drive full-scale user adoption of the technology across our entire agency?
• Do you understand our agency’s business?
• Do you understand our key performance indicators (KPIs)?
• Does your proposed service-level agreement (SLA) meet our needs?
  • How quickly do you respond to incidents and resolve them?
  • Does the SLA align with our agency’s KPIs?
• Do you have case studies from previous clients?
• Do you share analytics, reporting and usage statistics with your customers?

With the right provider, organizations in both the private and public sectors experience many benefits and are able to focus on their mission rather than diverting resources and continually investing in human capital to technology needs.