Managed services is the practice of outsourcing, on a proactive basis, the IT services, responsibilities and functions of your organisation. It is a method that is designed to improve operational efficiency and to cut expenses. It is the alternative to the typical break/fix model where the IT service provider will charge only for work completed. How can this method improve your productivity and is it right for your business in Dubai?
Systems updates
One of the areas which most affects businesses is the updating of its systems software and hardware. Patches and updates are released by Microsoft and other systems providers on a near daily basis. These are designed to improve functionality and to fight against threats such as malware or viruses. If you are not updating these on a regular basis then your IT networks run the risk of failure or errors.
Managed service providers often use a scheduling system based on your hours of work. So as soon as your employees are away from the office for the evening, their personal computer and your servers will be updated with the necessary releases. This action will save your business time and money, and will allow your workforce to continue working at the same rate.
Predictive monitoring
One of the most beneficial functions, with respect to productivity, is the act of predictive monitoring. A good managed service provider will run a software that will sit on your network and hardware. It will constantly monitor the activity of all of the systems on the network. The benefit here is that it can predict outages, failures and potential problems. These can be as little as the printer running out of ink through to a business critical failure on your server.
The software does this by understanding failures. For instance, if a server were to fail, it doesn’t all of sudden just fail. There are normally a series of events that lead to this failure. The software will understand these events and will send a warning to your IT support team when these pre-breakage actions occur. In this way, the IT provider can understand the problem and the action required.
The predictive monitoring function can be a game changer to a business. It can solve minor to major problems and near eliminate downtime.
It is important to check that your managed services provider is using a robust system to monitor your network, or a system at all. It is vital to check what they are using to fulfil this task.
Controlled routing
One of the biggest time wasters in an office environment is the use of the internet. It is nigh on impossible to sit behind each employee to understand what they are using the internet for throughout the day.
With a controlled routing system, a business can
- Control the sites to which your employees have access
- Monitor and track sites visited
- Allow access to personal sites on a timed basis, or by schedule
- Restrict sites that could potentially cause a threat to your business integrity or IT network
Employing and managing these routers can be a time consuming task, just imagine the number of new sites launched per day and trying to block potentially harmful ones.
The best managed service providers will provide a system that controls this function and will monitor and feedback to you. This will ensure that you know what your employees are doing on the net and that they are productive with their tasks.
Backup and recovery
It is said that the backup of your data is the most important part of your IT responsibility. “93% of companies that lost their data for 10 days or more during a disaster, filed for bankruptcy within one year of the disaster” (National Archives & Records Administration in Washington). Yet even with this terrifying statistic, only 4% of businesses back up their employee’s systems.
It is imperative that a robust system and schedule of backups is employed within your business. Imagine your business of 20 people working for a week and then you have a server outage. You would lose your work for the last week x 20 staff! Even if you just calculated the lost time in salaries, let alone opportunity cost, the figure would be frightening.
Your managed service provider will be able to engage a backup system that runs on a frequency that suits your business, they will also have a route to recovering the information and getting the business back to where it was, should something happen.
This function is as vital as your business itself.
SLAs
When making an agreement with an IT services company in Dubai, one must consider the SLA (Service Level Agreement) that they offer. This is their commitment to perform actions within a set timescale, whether routine tasks or responses to outages or failures. A typical provider will give a range of timescales for outages based upon their affect on the business. For instance, a business critical outage (one that affects the entire business) would be addressed immediately whereas a simple change to an email signature (or similar) may take a little longer.
It is the ability to manage this time that provides tremendous value to your business. If a serious outage occurs then you have a team on standby with an ‘all hands to the pump’ approach. It will also allow you to plan for the minor changes, all of which have a timely completion.
Taking on a managed services provider can be a breath of life into the IT systems of your business. You are employing a team of skilled IT professionals to overhaul and protect your business and its data. It is also important to ensure that the right team is looking after your business, please read “How to compare the cost of IT Services in Dubai: What are the factors that matter?”, for more information.
