Four IT priorities that are better as a Service

In our current environment, IT organizations are asked to do more than ever before, so creating IT capacity by outsourcing anything that would be more cost-effective and resilient as SaaS should be a no brainer. 

At Mavenspire, we are passionate about enabling success for our clients, helping them realize their business goals and understand which outsourcing solutions are right for them long-term. Here are 4 IT priorities that you should outsource immediately.

1. Security 

Security is one of the most important responsibilities placed on IT organizations – and one of the hardest to implement and stay on top of. IT threats change daily, and the effort required to keep up can consume multiple people. SOCaaS turns the task of overseeing security infrastructure to an organization that is staffed with security experts and can see patterns across multiple organizations to identify and stop threats before they affect you.  We recommend offerings that have a human component; a concierge that focuses on your organization and provides a single point of contact. That way, if potential threats arise, they’ll be handled quickly and you won’t spend valuable time re-explaining your environment to level 1 support technicians. We often partner with Arctic Wolf to help our clients outsource security. Here’s a case study to illustrate how they help.

2. Email & Collaboration  

Both Google and Microsoft offer extremely valuable and compelling suites of tools through GoogleApps and Microsoft365 (newly renamed). Like most cloud offerings, the only fly in the ointment is the level of support available when outages occur and the long-term ability to recover data for the multitude of reasons it might be needed. For this reason, this year we are focused on making sure that our clients have introduced a backup technology for their Google or Microsoft environments. Backup solutions for cloud offerings have significantly improved over the past year offering ease of use, better reporting, and better API support. With those solutions in place, outsourcing email and collaboration is basically effortless and drives costs down.

3. Back-up  

It’s the most painful IT task ever. Legacy backup systems are slow, unstable, and in need of constant maintenance. Upgrading to more modern solutions eases the burden, but IT still has the enormous responsibility of testing backups and having a cohesive disaster recovery strategy. DRaaS and Private Cloud offerings from our partners have become a valuable offering to meet multiple needs for our clients while saving them time and money.  Services like offsite storage, total management of backup, and burstable private cloud capabilities for DR offload the burden from IT without sacrifice. 

4. Multi-location management 

Because of the Pandemic, having IT operations in multiple sites, or even a single unbreakable location has become an urgent need. Colocation sites provide stable environmental and power resources while sitting on the nexus of multiple carrier connections (providing cheap and resilient Internet services). Some Colocation sites are tax free zones, providing important cost savings for organizations needing to purchase IT equipment for installation in the centers. You can even create a Private Cloud within an outsourced facility and offload the administrative requirements of hardware maintenance, network management, and security management.  Regardless of the level of service you need, this approach provides a cost-effective second site for operations. One of the biggest trends we have seen over the last 12 months is organizations that take advantage of the remote speed and uptime in their outsourced facility by moving production there and bringing DR on prem. We often work with Databank of these types of projects. Here’s a case study to illustrate how they can help.

Your IT organization’s focus is best spent on efforts that can’t be done better and more cheaply by someone else. Send us an email if you’d like to explore cost and headache-saving outsourcing strategies.