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A few weeks ago, I posted about the importance of <a href="http://egroup.jasonmangone.com/2013/08/managed-it-services-in-the-cloud-era/">Managed Services in the Cloud Era</a>. I touched on how complexity introduced with <a href="http://egroup.jasonmangone.com/what-we-do/services/cloud-services/" target="_blank">virtualization and cloud</a> is causing IT groups to struggle given the varying skills required to deliver what the business requires.

By augmenting the internal teams in key areas, businesses can gain the expertise and service levels required with a very predictable cost.

Small and Medium Businesses (SMBs) face a different challenge, however.

The SMB status-quo over the years has been that once an organization grows to a point that user support and their investment in IT extends beyond a few PCs and servers, they hire a few IT resources to help them extend their reach. These individuals often wears many hats, which unfortunately results in an inefficient IT infrastructure that fails to meet the service levels of the business.

The IT environment struggles to scale and reactive services/costly downtime create additional unexpected costs that are unexpected. Couple that with "rip and replace" capital costs just to get the environment running again further add to the IT expense of a growing organization.

The fact of the matter is that IT solutions and expertise struggle to grow with the business - this can happen in organizations with 10 people or 10,000 people.

The silver lining is that SMBs have many more options today in how to consume IT solutions, services and drive business value than they have had in the past. Cloud solutions and Software as a Service (SaaS) allow these organizations to consume IT solutions on their terms. There are few Cloud solutions that offer a "one-stop" cloud. IT organizations still need the resources to support end users access, internal systems and their access to external solutions as well.

This is where Managed Services or the Managed Cloud comes in. Managed Services allows SMBs to realize the competitive benefits of large organizations in several ways, all at a fixed and predictable cost:
<ul>
	<li><strong>Advisory Services</strong>: "Virtual CIOs" allow organizations access to senior level administrators to advise and design solutions specific to the needs of the business but also conforming to standards such as ITIL.</li>
	<li><strong>End User Support</strong>: 24x7 End User support for the variety of devices and methods in which workers consume IT today.</li>
	<li><strong>Fixed Cost Incident Based Support</strong>: 24x7 SLA driven incident based support for failures or issues within environment.</li>
	<li><strong>Proactive Maintenance</strong>: Maintenance of On-Premise and Cloud Based IT assets strictly guided by change management and proven best practices.</li>
	<li><strong>Backup and Recovery Services</strong>: Secure, Safe, Off-Site backup and recovery services that protect your most valuable asset - your data.</li>
	<li><strong>Professional Services</strong>: Services conducted by solution specific trained and certified resources for IT projects and initiatives to ensure you roll out new or upgraded solutions successfully.</li>
</ul>
Offloading the design and support of these vital business functions allows entrepreneurs, CIOs, and managers, the ability to focus on value generation for the business vs. value maintenance. With cost models that are reasonable and scale as your business grows, managed services for on-premise environments or in the cloud allow organizations to accelerate their business growth by focusing on the value of their business vs. the "tools" used to deliver that value.

As always, please let me know if you have any questions or would like to speak in more depth. Just drop a comment below.

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