Whether organizations have in-house technical expertise, outsourced IT providers, or a combination of the two, many still turn to professional IT services to help deploy and manage their solutions. A main attraction to professional IT services is that IT providers can act as an extended IT arm for your internal staff.
IT providers are able to handle the management, maintenance, and security for your company’s critical networks and infrastructure. Let’s break down the array of IT services that IT providers offer to assist organizations with their technical challenges.
Desktop Managed Services
If you already have the enterprise side covered (storage, servers, networking) then desktop managed services are a great offering for the full management of your client environment. Because this IT service is ongoing, you’re provided a remote agent that is pushed out to all of your client devices and is continuously monitored, updated, and managed when necessary. This makes resolving trouble tickets much easier, as they IT provider doesn’t even have to be onsite. You’re responsible for purchasing the client machines, but the professional IT services provider will spec out the machines for you.
Enterprise Managed Services
Organizations that have the desktop side covered can greatly benefit from IT services on their backend infrastructure. This service covers everything from storage, servers, networking, virtualization, cloud architectures, & security. The IT professional services provider will work with you directly to determine if hardware needs to be upgraded, and determine the exact configurations needed for a seamless deployment. Like desktop IT services, the IT provider provides remote tools to receive continuous updates and reporting on your critical backend infrastructure; Including but not limited to:
- Capacity
- Utilization
- Performance
Hosted Managed Services
For organizations that want a model that just works, hosted managed services offer an array of benefits. This eliminates the enterprise IT management side of your business because your company will run out of an IT services providers’ IT infrastructure. They’ll work directly with you to help determine your utilization and performance requirements, and then allocate resources from their infrastructure for your business to run on. Some of the perks include but aren’t limited to:
- No longer need to purchase enterprise hardware
- No longer need to increase space on physical client machines as your storage is in the cloud
- Easily scale your allocated IT infrastructure as your business increases or decreases in size, enabling a ‘pay as you grow’ model
Project Based Services
Separate from ongoing managed or hosted services, professional based services can help you tackle projects that are difficult to perform with in-house technical resources. These projects could include:
- Hardware deployments
- Cloud migrations
- Virtualizing your environment
- Datacenter moves
This model enables you to leverage outsources expertise as needed so that you can determine project timelines, while the provider assists with the execution plan behind those projects. The IT provider will work along side your staff, or completely standalone depending on your technical skillset and needs. Concluding, project plans are a great way to fill your technical gap and continue enhancing your IT infrastructure.
Block of Hours
Lastly, Block of Hours are an IT services offering that allows you to purchase predetermined hourly blocks to use for your team. This is ideal for organizations that know they have projects coming up that fall outside of their internal skill-set but aren’t sure when the project will get kicked off, or just know they’ll need some IT support and aren’t ready for a managed services provider yet.
Flexibility for your business
Regardless of the current state of your IT team and environment, there are professional IT services offerings that enable you to choose whichever fits your organization best.
Note that you’re not locked in to choosing just one. As an example, maybe your organization is looking for Desktop Managed Services but also needs some help on the enterprise end of your IT infrastructure. You have the ability to purchase a block of hours or a project-based set of hours to complement your technical staff.
Regardless of your internal technical skill-set, there are professional IT services options that will act as an extended IT arm to your business.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]
