What is Managed Services?
Managed services is the practice of partnering with an external organization with a broad-range of experts and talent to support information technology operations. It provides strategic guidance to organizations to evolve their solutions to continually align with market and business conditions. This requires a managed services provider (MSP) who delivers services to leverage their extensive network of experts, application, infrastructure, and security protocols with regular support and strategic guidance. There are essentially two types of managed services. The first type is a fully supported managed service that runs entirely in a cloud environment that is handled and supported by a MSP, such as Zia Consulting. The second option is in-place managed services where an MSP like Zia provides the services within the customer’s existing cloud, or on-premise environment.
Why would you want managed services?
Organizations often need the best and brightest talent to continue to evolve their solutions to meet the ever changing demands of their businesses and processes. Building that type of talent internally can be expensive, time consuming, and ladened with risk given the lack of redundancy and ability to scale. Zia managed services can help your organization future-proof and mitigate against these risks by leveraging our expansive talent pool that is responsible for anticipating and adapting to emerging trends, technologies, and solutions. Zia provides strategic advisory services to evolve your solutions to meet these demands. Reducing cost and leveraging managed services ensures you have access-on-demand to this type of talent pool and services to achieve your long-term success and avoid stagnation.
Companies often struggle to innovate by having an internal employee performing application and platform support, as well as doing updates and upgrades, instead of working on other critical internal projects that can help their organization achieve faster and better results. Most of the time, the internal resource who takes over managing the environment isn’t trained to do so but is more technical than their colleagues. As a result, they spend a lot of time catching up with patches and updates, reading and interpreting new information, and trying to keep up with the needs of a large scale platform. This leads to solution stagnation and internal frustration due the time associated with deploying new features and processes. Zia Managed Services solves that problem.
Jeremy White, Zia’s Director of SAP, Cloud, and Managed Services said, “It’s kind of like building the plane while you’re trying to take off. Having to relearn things while they’re working on patches and updates can end up taking much longer. It can be four, five, or even six times longer because they just don’t have the muscle memory. Zia can do this faster because it’s what we do all day, every day.” He continued to explain that because the success of an internal application and its associated infrastructure often hinges on one person, there’s typically a single point of failure and significant risk. He stated, “In most instances, a customer has one employee and one backup that is responsible for this type of environment. They are typically working through a backlog and are never fully caught up. These employees take a vacation a few times a year and don’t usually work at night. Zia manages the environment 24/7, monitoring performance and resolving issues preemptively. Zia has an entire team of experts dedicated to keeping the managed services platform up to date and determining which updates and patches are relevant to business processes.
What does managed services entail?
When working with Zia Consulting, all patches and upgrades are included. Since the customer is hands off, internal resources can be redeployed to work on higher value internal projects and tasks. Customers who are responsible for their own patches and upgrades often let them pile up to be dealt with once a year in one big chunk. This is not only expensive, but also means the environment is out of date and running behind for the majority of the year. Zia’s 24/7 monitoring allows them to proactively recognize and address issues as they arise. They also leverage elasticity so customer environments can adjust automatically based on their needs and conditions. Another benefit to 24/7 monitoring is protection from outages and data loss. Jeremy White explains, “In the event of a catastrophic outage in an entire region, Zia can redeploy the full environment in as little as a few hours using our scripted deployments that leverage infrastructure as code, and Kubernetes to architect a warm standby to reduce that time to near zero. A customer would have to invest a significant amount of time and money to develop a failover business continuity protocol like this. Customers can leverage Zia’s investment in this process immediately for a fraction of the cost due to our economy of scale”.
What are the benefits of working with Zia Consulting?
Zia Consulting’s managed and cloud services allows your organization to leverage a secure, controlled, and scalable environment – anytime, anywhere, and managed by the most experienced resources in the industry. Zia gives your organization immediate flexibility, agility, and productivity gains, as well as access to our strategic advisory services that helps you future-proof your business solutions and prevent stagnation. You’ll also have the ability to deploy new processes rapidly and gain value by automating time consuming tasks and redeploying valuable internal resources to critical business processes. Working with Zia is different because:
- Strategic expertise and talent pool
- You own your data – No ingress, egress/regress fees
- Upgrades and patching are included in the Zia Cloud
- You can leverage your existing tenant/cloud provider
- No uplift on cloud provider infrastructure fees
- We operate as an extension of your existing IT&S team
- You will have flexibility and transparency on management of activities
- Integrations and/or custom applications can be included
Contact us today to learn more about how we can support your needs. We are committed to giving your organization immediate flexibility, agility, and productivity gains. You’ll also have the ability to deploy new processes rapidly and gain value by automating time consuming tasks and redeploying valuable internal resources to critical business processes.