How Businesses Recover From COVID-19....Controlling Costs Part II - Using Managed Services To Optimize Expenses

In part one of this series, we explained how the COVID-19 pandemic is putting tremendous pressure on enterprise decision makers to reduce costs. Unfortunately, this could significantly impact workers, with 67 percent of CFOs considering making cuts to their workforce.

Just how serious is the threat on a global scale? According to the UN, COVID-19 is expected to eliminate 6.7 percent of working hours, or about 195 million jobs worldwide, during 2Q20. This is largely because more than four fifths of global workers live in countries affected by partial or full measures.

As we pointed out our previous post, there are ways that enterprises can reduce costs during this difficult time instead of parting ways with valuable workers. This is something that we will continue to explore over the next several weeks.

One way this can be accomplished is to leverage managed IT services.

Let’s explore.

Managed Services: A Brief Overview

Using managed services involves outsourcing tasks to third party providers. Managed services can provide cost-effective coverage for a range of needs, including daily operational support, computing infrastructure, maintenance, network monitoring, and trouble ticketing. Companies commonly leverage managed services to streamline cloud management, cybersecurity, disaster recovery, virtualization, data storage, and so on.

Using managed services is a great way to increase internal staff production, as it can free IT workers to focus on more impactful projects that can save money or generate revenue instead of spending all of their time — including night and weekends — on low level backend tasks.

At the same time, companies often bring in expert architects to design complex environments and hand off management once completed to thier internal teams. This is a great way to reduce project completion time, while eliminating costly learning curves.

The Benefits of Managed Services

According to one study, for every 100 users, about $400,000 can be saved annually — amounting to several worker salaries. However, savings can vary from company to company.

One easy way to calculate the benefits of managed services is to run a simple cost comparison, analyzing how much money the business typically spends on IT expenses each year, compared to the cost of investing in a managed IT services program.

Managed services can provide a variety of additional benefits for an organization, too:

Support during layoffs: As some companies will experience during the next few months, layoffs can be inevitable, even after large spending cuts. When this happens, managed services can be used to offset employee loss, allowing depleted departments to keep functioning.

SLA-backed agreements: Managed service providers are held in check by the information outlined in their service level agreements (SLAs). By signing an SLA, a company can transfer responsibility for certain processes that carry extra financial risk.

Scalability: IT workers can be very expensive to hire, especially when filling top tier positions. In fact, the average IT decision maker salary is now hovering around $141,024. Outsourcing responsibilities to a managed service provider can help a growing company scale its IT team without breaking the bank.

Security and Compliance: Cybercrime is advancing at a rapid pace, with a variety of sophisticated threats coming to market that are too difficult for the average enterprise to combat on their own. Working with a managed cybersecurity provider is a great way to stay ahead of the technology curve, as it can provide access to advanced systems and safeguards that would be too resource-intensive to bring in-house. Many managed IT suppliers specialize in ensuring their clients are compliant in one or multiple compliance requirements, making it much less of a burden to monitor internally.

Tax benefits: Investing in managed services can also be better for tax purposes. For example, a company may lease computing hardware from a vendor instead of buying it outright. In doing so, the cost of leasing can be classified daily OPEX instead of CAPEX — allowing the company to deduct expenses and reduce income tax.

FreedomFire Communications offers a robust portfolio of managed services from leading providers such as CenturyLink, AT&T, and Verizon, as well as smaller organizations with niche offerings.

For more information about FreedomFire Communications’ managed services portfolio....and to take advantage of all the options available to your company.... simply tell us what you need at the link below.

Managed Services

The Benefits Of Managed Services Will Knock Your Socks Off

"Managed services" is defined as an umbrella term for third-party monitoring and maintaining of computers, software and networks. The actual equipment may be inhouse or at the third-party's facilities, but is running at a certain specified quality level or keeping the software up-to-date.

For example, if an organization requires a secure, available, and redundant IT environment to support their business-critical systems and applications, usually it needs managed IT services including replication services, storage services, hosting services, network management and monitoring services, managed security services, email and collaboration services, disaster recovery solutions, and application services, etc.

Neglected or overlooked IT maintenance tasks can lead to potentially devastating business consequences, and hence the need for proactive network maintenance should be acknowledged. Service calls to IT contractors or IT infrastructure consultants take up to three times longer to diagnose the issue when compared to networks that are under an IT Managed Services contract. This increases the costs of repairs considerably - not to mention that the repairs could have been avoided had there been a contract with a professional IT Services Partner.

Remote management services ensure that most of the maintenance tasks are performed well in time with no impact on the company's workflow. Relying on the services of an experienced IT Services Partner can help an organization manage preventive maintenance requirements of critical technology resources. Given below are some benefits of managed services:

Cost-effective

A professional and reliable partner can help eliminate data recovery costs and expensive repairs by addressing problems before they pose huge network blockades. Moreover, managed services cost much less when compared to hiring an in-house IT team. Most Service Providers charge a fixed monthly fee for performing regular maintenance, including but not limited to data backups, security patches, virus protection updates, firewall protection updates and network performance maintenance.

Faster support

The best part of having an IT Services partner is that the received support is very fast. An efficient partner can diagnose and repair most issues using remote management tools, saving time as well as money.

Optimal performance

A professional IT Services partner performs regular preventative maintenance, thus ensuring that the performance is optimum with fewer network issues and less downtime.

Budget predictability

Most IT services come with a fixed cost which makes it easier to estimate your IT budget for the contracted period, especially as you do not need to spend exorbitantly on addressing random IT roadblocks.

Improved data integrity 

When an organization invests in reactive maintenance and repairs, there is a huge probability of losing mission critical data. The possibility of data loss due to hardware and software failure is eliminated by a managed IT service provider.

Efficient risk management

Managed IT services can safeguard the security and integrity of your network and can limit and control IT risks to a great extent. Now, can you put a price on peace of mind?

Last but not the least; IT managed services can free you up from the worry of managing your IT and can help you focus on your core business.

If you're looking for what the best managed services options are for YOUR organization we offer a FREE service that will help you do just that....including comparing available providers with rate quotes. Simply ask us at the link below....it's easy as 1, 2, 3.

Managed Services Solutions

Century Link's Managed Services And Solutions Overview

If your business is considering managed services as part of your overall IT strategy, particularly cloud based, then Century Link should definitely be on your short list.  Here’s why......

POSITIONED FOR GROWTH

Something everyone can understand is the tremendous growth within the cloud market. At one hundred forty-six billion dollars this year, the cloud market is growing at a rate we’ve never seen before. The growth will only continue; we expect the cloud market to grow to two hundred thirty-six billion dollars by 2020, that is a 22 percent compound annual growth rate. What this means is if we are not having a conversation with our customers about cloud, somebody else is. Thirty-two billion dollars is just infrastructure and platform cloud, and when we discuss that we typically have to also talk about public cloud, private cloud and all the different pieces of cloud. By 2020, we expect 85 percent of enterprises to commit a multi-cloud architecture model.

CLOUD APPLICATION MANAGER

Cloud Application Manager is a platform that can help you manage any infrastructure, cloud, and application. The platform’s features which include Application Lifecycle Management, Managed Services Everywhere, and the deployment of Azure Cloud will help you manage any infrastructure from a single interface.

With Application Lifecycle Management you can manage applications from start to finish, scale, schedule deployments, update, terminate workloads, and automate migration across environments to any cloud to best suit business needs. You can also utilize continuous auto-discovery of available resources seamlessly and in any infrastructure on a single platform. Let’s discuss what application lifecycle management offers:

SELF-SERVICE APPLICATION CATALOG

• Cloud Application Manager’s intuitive portal allows users to self-serve reusable infrastructure, applications and charts.
• Components can be deployed based on pre-set IT policies.

AUTHENTICATION

• Federated access control, user management and permission definition of an infrastructure provide visibility and auditing capabilities.

ORCHESTRATION

• Customers define applications with infrastructure provisioned at the time of deployment.
• A wide range of inherent automation protocols enables flexibility across heterogeneous environments.

ADMIN & REPORTING

• Extensive administration rules promote IT governance for the delivery of services as well as managing users, namespace, templates, and resources.
• Real-time dashboard for viewing containers, applications, resources, user activity and clusters in use.

AUTO DISCOVERY

• Discover cloud instances already running in other environments, such as other public cloud platforms.

As mentioned previously Managed Services Anywhere is another feature that is part of the Cloud Application Manager platform. Having CenturyLink manage mission-critical workloads and infrastructure enables customers to focus on their core business. Certified experts at CenturyLink can monitor and operate system patches and updates on any hybrid instance.

WHAT DOES THE MANAGED SERVICES ANYWHERE FEATURE HAVE TO OFFER?

MONITORING

• OS and Application level monitoring including proactive and reactive support.
• Reduce errors and enhance security
• Leverage experts to monitor the environment, freeing you to focus on your core business needs

CONFIGURATION & ACCESS MANAGEMENT

• CenturyLink takes full responsibility for user policies, administration and password management enforcement.
• CenturyLink confirms the initial install and basic functionality using an OS image built on vendor-recommended best-practices and years of industry experience.
• Managed instances initiate automation processes to update the OS to meet standards and requirements defined by the customer.

PATCHING & UPDATES

• Available support for all critical and vendor-recommended patches — only OS vendor-recommended patches are installed.
• Customers have full control to define scheduled patching cycles.
• Automated systems track change requests, perform patch management and provide detailed reports.

VENDOR & CHANGE MANAGEMENT

• CenturyLink maintains ownership and management responsibility for the customer’s underlying VM and OS.
• The customer is freed from managing daily OS-level functions, SPLAs and licenses for Linux and Windows OSs.
• CenturyLink takes full responsibility of the license, regardless of where the instance lives.
• Transparency and Compliance: CenturyLink performs changes for the customer on defined instances and tracks all the changes for auditing purposes.

The third main feature is Cloud Optimization, which reduces overhead cost via automation and gives customers a competitive advantage through single bill consolidation. Enables procurement and management of Azure cloud instances alongside CenturyLink Cloud services, all from a single platform.

CONSOLIDATED BILLING AND ACCOUNT MANAGEMENT

• Auto-discover pre-existing instance of Microsoft Azure subscriptions.
• Report on CenturyLink Cloud services, Azure Classic, ARM and Azure Stack.
• Cloud Application Manager will also show costs for non-VM resources.
• With the Cloud Edition, pay for only what you need: per hour, per service.

PURCHASE MICROSOFT AZURE DIRECTLY

• Virtual Machines and Virtual Machine Scale Sets and Virtual Networking.
• Storage: blog, file, and disk.
• Alternatively, use Cloud Application Manager to manage pre-existing Azure instances.

AUTOMATED DEPLOYMENT

• Automate Azure deployments to reduce complexity and improve delivery time.
• Natively deploy Azure virtual machine, web and work roles from Cloud Application Manager via API.

WHAT ARE MANAGED SERVICES?

You might be wondering what managed services are and how this works in the data center. Below is a checklist of what is in CenturyLink’s wheelhouse from a managed services perspective.

Through CenturyLink’s managed services teams, they can do any of these and more.

WHY WOULD WE SELL MANAGED SERVICES?

CenturyLink Managed Services secure and optimize your network, applications, and infrastructure so you can compete at the speed of business.

Extensive Portfolio

• Single source, turnkey managed services provider offering end-to-end solutions
• Experienced and accountable teams who thrive in IT complexity
• 24×7 follow-the-sun customer support simplifies IT management

Flexible & Agile Delivery Models

• We build for scale, managing services across more than 60 global data centers
• Certified experts improve agility by securing networks, infrastructure, and application environments
• Better financial models and controls help track budgets and predict IT costs

Increased Business Performance

• Keep pace with global competition with scalable IT initiatives
• Collaborative partnership for bimodal IT and digital transformation initiatives
• With simplified management and costs, businesses can focus on market expansion, improved customer experience, and new business opportunities

CCA MANAGED SERVICES ENGAGEMENT MODEL

Take a look above at CenturyLink’s new engagement model which is built around Managed Services. If you envision yourself as the partner or partner owner, when you find an opportunity you will bring that to your T-CAs, at that point if it is a transactional opportunity your T-CAs point of contact will help you with an engineering quote and close that deal as fast as possible. The goal is to keep that moving along, so they can recognize the revenue. If the opportunity through a discussion with your T-CAs turns out to be more complex, a managed services specialist will be brought in. The managed services specialist will then begin to engage the resources that are listed on the right-hand side of the chart above.

What is important for you to realize is you have a single point of contact in your T-CAs, and you also have resources that potentially were not there in the past. The resources include a hybrid IT specialists whose job is to help sell the private or public cloud offerings, colocation specialists who present benefits of CTL colocation offerings. Solutions architects are also available who handle complex workloads involving multiple solutions and products, and finally, CenturyLink also has client engagement managers who can uncover additional partner and customer needs.

The model below also shows customers that CenturyLink’s platform can accommodate all of the customer’s application needs. The key point being that CenturyLink’s portfolio is capable of handling applications, and ultimately that they are agnostic about where that application goes. CenturyLink wants to have a consultative approach, so the application is placed in the appropriate platform and works efficiently.

How The Cloud Could Have Saved The Day

Having worked off-and-on as a network administrator for the past 15+ years, I am often reminded of just what a life-saver the cloud and managed services can be. This past weekend, I happened to step into a situation where ignoring these benefits led to a complete nightmare for one "unlucky" customer.

I was called-in as a favor on what basically turned out to be a disaster recovery operation. The disaster did not come in the way of a flood, fire or earthquake though. It came in the form of a rogue IT employee who basically took down his employer's entire telecommunications network upon his sudden, forced exit from the company. 

To protect the innocent, I will not get into too many details about the customer, other than state the fact that it was an (otherwise) fairly modern medical office that depended upon a single employee to handle it servers, network connectivity, hardware, software, back-ups and phone service. What could possibly go wrong?

Hardware, software and telecom services were spread out all over the place. No standardization of operating systems, no network redundancy, pretty much no firewall to speak of, no way to monitor or shape network utilization, a mix of analog phone lines from one company and a VoIP service used for other lines from a different company, a wi-fi network that had access to HIPAA sensitive files, unencrypted and incomplete data backups stored on servers overseas and sky-high expenses on everything including software, telecom hardware, broadband service and external hosting providers. To complicate matters, the IT director had been summarily dismissed before the employer managed to shut off his remote access or recover any of the numerous administrative passwords.

To put it mildly, this customer is in deep trouble. It will take many weeks and thousands of dollars to unravel the enormous problems that a single employee has been allowed to cause. That brings me to the actual point of this article, which is what could have been done to prevent such a nightmare. This is where the real benefits of the cloud and managed services begin to seep in. The below are a list of measures that could have been taken to avoid such an ugly and costly incident. The next time you are consulting a customer on the benefits of moving their business to the cloud and a managed service provider, you may want to keep this story and list in mind.

1. A cloud-based phone system operated by a managed service provider could have assured the customer of continued communications without having to pull the plug on their entire network. A managed firewall and monitored network could easily allow access to vital services while blocking unauthorized access from the outside.
2. Consolidating services with a single provider would have dramatically lessened the time needed to get in touch with a number of different providers to reset passwords, revoke account access and redirect phone calls.
3. A managed broadband circuit with monitoring would have ensured that the customer was subscribed to an adequate amount of bandwidth and perhaps even saved them some money. It definitely would have improved the quality of their VoIP calls, which were previously said to be an issue. As it was, all traffic was basically treated the same and the customer had no idea if they were paying for too much or too little service.
4. Integrated Software as a Service could have done away with a multitude of licensing and hardware issues that were found, provided superior customer support and protected the customer from security issues caused by obsolete operating systems and office software. It would also have lessened the impact of losing passwords known only to a single administrator.
5. The cloud could have provided complete, encrypted backups of sensitive customer data with greater privacy and perhaps even at a lower cost.
6. Outsourced IT management quite possibly would have prevented a single employee from obtaining such a stranglehold on this customer's operations by carefully screening prospective employees and implementing policies that would allow them to easily be replaced without downtime or concern of security breaches.
7. Using a knowledgeable agent or cloud broker could have saved this customer thousands of dollars by consolidating lines, preparing competitive quotes from a number of different carriers and coordinating efforts between vendors. An experienced agent would have also recommended a suitable back-up plan in the event that the customer's primary carrier suffered a service disruption.
8. Many carriers and vendors have divisions that specialize in helping customers comply with HIPAA regulations, thus protecting their patient's privacy, steering clear of legal problems and safeguarding their licenses. Using one of these providers may have saved them from many headaches that could still result from this incident.
9. Physical security of the customer's building was also compromised as a direct result, as the employee evidently had a door key and passcode for the alarm system. Cloud providers and managed service providers neither want nor need this level of access. In addition to cost of addressing IT issues, the customer also had to employ an armed guard, locksmith, private investigator and paid for a field call from their alarm company. Again, none of this would have been necessary if the customer had relied upon the cloud, a broker and a managed service provider.
10. Although the customer had a mix of both traditional analog lines and VoIP service (albeit from different providers), neither were integrated with the other to provide any sort of redundancy. Thus, they still had a working lines for faxes, a credit card terminal and alarm system, but they were otherwise unable to make or receive calls until a new firewall was installed and network connectivity was restored. Obviously, bundling of services with a single, integrated provider or adding vendor-recommended hardware to their system could have prevented their blackout of phone service to a large degree.

Unfortunately, this was an "accident" that never had to happen. While the human factor can never be 100% accounted for, using the appropriate technology for the job could have saved this customer an enormous amount of time, money, legal headaches and perhaps even loss of reputation.

When you consider that taking full advantage of the cloud and managed services would have most likely been less expensive for the customer to begin with, you have to wonder why agents and cloud brokers aren't in even higher demand than they are now.

William Van Hefner

For free quotes and support comparing the cloud and managed services options available at your specific location....simply ask at the following link.  It's as easy as 1, 2, 3.

Cloud Services