The company’s decision to outsource some of the services is no longer a surprise. Office rental and maintenance, transportation, legal and accounting services are typically outsourced by businesses to outside partners.
It is often more efficient and flexible to buy services rather than manage own property or hire professionals with highly specialised competences. This approach is gradually evolving in the area of information technology as well – IT as a Service (ITaaS) is a better alternative to costly maintenance of own infrastructure.
ITaaS trends and good practices will be widely addressed at the traditional “Technology and Resilience 2018” conference, organized by the BAIP.
When IT becomes a burden
Until recently, it has been a commonplace to invest significantly in own IT infrastructure – deploying costly and sophisticated information systems that require a lot of financial and human resources to maintain.
Over the years, infrastructure is aging and maintenance costs are rising. Then, the company management begins to perceive IT not as a means of increasing business efficiency but as a growing cost line in the company budget. When costs are high, it’s becoming increasingly difficult for the IT department of the company to justify investments in newer and more advanced IT solutions.
Expensive own IT infrastructure often complicates the business’s ability to respond flexibly to change. Practice shows that the opposite is true: the company is forced to adapt to the capabilities of its IT systems.
This means that the company often has hands tied and can’t implement innovative first-to-market solutions, thus missing the opportunity to quickly gain a competitive advantage. Paradoxically, then the IT department in the company becomes an obstacle rather a bearer of innovations…
The new approach – IT as a service
With the advent of cloud technology, organizations could fundamentally change their approach to IT infrastructure and its management.
The ITaSS model is based on the pay-per-use principle. ITaaS allows practically all the basic services to be purchased as a service – the business can only buy the services it needs at that time, and to the extent, they are needed.
For example, when expanding business capabilities or recruiting new employees it can easily expand the volume of IT services. Conversely, if the demand is decreasing – fewer services are purchased.
Such principle will be highly appealing to the chief financial officer of the company since it is obvious that IT expenditure correlates with the scope of the company’s operations. Spending on IT services per month becomes clear and transparent. Furthermore, it reduces the fixed financial burden of maintaining expensive owned IT infrastructure.
In addition, the company’s IT professionals can concentrate on the company’s IT strategy and innovation rather than coping with daily “fires” in their IT infrastructure.
What are the possibilities of ITaaS? Indeed, ITaaS offers a number of opportunities – for example, buying software as a service (SaaS), infrastructure as a service (IaaS) or security as a service only. There are more of these areas, but the general trend is that in the long term IT will be perceived as “Everything as a Service”.
Where to start?
There is no single recipe because of the difference in enterprise size, activity and IT needs. Therefore, before deciding to migrate to the virtual environment, it is important to conduct a thorough IT audit and plan what IT functions to acquire as a cloud-based service, and what would be kept inside the company. Before implementing such a hybrid model, it is important to analyse whether ITaaS services will work seamlessly with the company’s IT infrastructure.
No less important is to consider the company’s business objectives, in order to select the right IT solutions: maybe, you will increase the number of employees, perhaps you plan to develop e-commerce, deploy new information systems that require additional IT capabilities?
Unlike the implementation of own IT system, migration to ITaaS is a quick process. The deployment of a traditional IT system can take up to 20 months while preparation for the ITaaS – just over a month.
Moving “to the cloud” requires specific knowledge and experience, therefore, it is important to use an IT team that already has the ITaaS deployment experience, understands the needs of your business and can offer effective solutions, before installing the ITaaS model.
We invite you to get to know more about ITaaS practices in the seminar “ITaaS – a new approach to the IT service delivery” on June 25-29th. Register HERE.
