The Top 4 Benefits of Managed Network Services for Your Business
Navigating the network infrastructure landscape has never been easy. Nor has managing it. And it’s not getting easier.
Over the past few years we have accelerated toward a hybrid cloud infrastructure. In parallel, unified communication and collaboration tools have never been more important as they increasingly become the primary lifeline of interaction for the distributed workforce.
The diversity of locations from where the workforce accesses systems has never been as extensive. Employees are working from home, on premises, and even on the move. This diversity is matched by the variety of endpoints that are now prevalent, such as mobile devices, laptops, tablets, and traditional workstations.
Together, this diversity of location, endpoints and distributed cloud-hosted applications bring about increased vulnerabilities from a cybersecurity standpoint and significant difficulties in setup and administration.
For any business, managing the network infrastructure to meet these challenges is a formidable proposition. This makes the case to engage with managed network service (MNS) providers a sensible proposition for most modern enterprises. Here are four wide-ranging yet meaningful benefits of a partnership with an MNS provider.
1. Costs
Managing the network infrastructure demands expert staffing, tooling and significant organizational process maturity and capability. All of this is expensive. Hiring skilled staff, investing in the latest monitoring tech, and setting up a network operations center (NOC), are all non-trivial capital-intensive tasks.
MNS providers remove the CAPEX associated with the upfront costs of setting all this up. The move to an OPEX model, typically subscription based, also brings about advantages from a budgetary and planning standpoint. If there is one overarching benefit with the managed services model, it is this – significant financial advantages.
2. Improved Business Focus and Productivity
By handing off the onus of managing the network infrastructure, enterprises can now deploy their internal resources to focus on their core business offerings.
With an MNS provider on board, in-house network operations teams are no longer tied up dealing with network related issues at the help-desk. This frees them up to work on more strategic initiatives, such as launching new revenue-generating services, and planning for the future needs of the business. This includes establishing the overall digital transformation roadmap to support growth and derive the competitive benefits of technological innovations.
3. Increased Business Agility
Planning for digital transformation is one thing, executing it is probably the biggest stumbling block. IT initiatives can get bogged down by the lack of experience dealing with emerging tech, the issues with deployment, and other unanticipated problems that always seem to crop up.
MNS providers bring with them the knowledge and experience driven by the simple fact that their core business revolves around managing the environments of a wide variety of customers.
This exposes them to the issues associated with deploying infrastructure in multiple complex ecosystems and enables them to have the know-how to navigate typical issues involved with the roll-out of new tech.
By significantly reducing the time-to-market, MNS providers can have a direct impact on the realization of revenue driven by the deployment of new services.
They can also react faster to shorter-term business needs. For example, if a product launch or sale is expected to drive a higher volume of interaction for certain business services, the MNS provider can provision access accordingly to manage the increased traffic.
4. A Superior User and Customer Experience
The managed service provider model is driven by the service level agreements (SLA) that is established between the vendor and the enterprise consuming the services. This lays out the expectations and baseline performance of the services related to the network infrastructure.
MNS providers face penalties if the network infrastructure underperforms. This translates into their primary focus being the high availability of services to meet the SLAs in place.
All this results in a superior level of satisfaction from the end-user’s perspective. Whether it’s employees accessing systems to go about their daily activities or customers interacting with the business, the reliability and availability of core business services directly drives higher User Experience and Customer Experience scores.