IS OFFSHORING AN ANSWER FOR MANAGED SERVICE PROVIDERS IN US?

Off-shoring is a growing trend across the globe. Owing to the impending changes in the immigration rules in the US, there is an potential shortage of skilled resources. The cost involved in engaging skilled resources is relatively higher. Off-shoring your L1 and L2 services can reap you maximum benefit. A number of managed service providers have chosen off-shoring, because of the numerous benefits associated with it.

EQUITABLE TALENT

Off-shoring has the benefit of hiring fair and impartial talents which in turn reduces the subsidiary costs involved in it.

WIDER OPTIONS

When a company chooses to off-shore, it can choose from a variety of Managed Service Providers, based on the company's need such as low pricing, reduced risks, high quality.

COST REDUCTION

When services are off-shored, the requirement for large infrastructure is less. Therefore a significant amount of money could be saved.

REDUCED LABOR COSTS:

Off-shoring could be done in countries which has relatively lower labor costs, hence the money spend on labor costs could be saved.

FOCUS ON CORE COMPETENCIES:

Level 1 and Level 2 services can be off-shored while MSPs can concentrate on other works which are of prime importance.

TIME ZONE:

Since off-shoring is done across countries, it enables 24/7 service delivery which assures increase in revenue and maintains competency.

In addition to these advantages and also the impending change in immigration rules in the US, Off-shoring is an wise option to opt for.

Wanna Protect Your System From WannaCry? Choose Patch Management

What is Patch Management ?

Patch Management is an process,which manages patches or upgrades software applications and technologies. As the name suggests a patch is a piece of software designed to update a computer program or its supporting data. It also identifies threats and protects your system against it. 

One of the best methods to safeguard your system and its applications is by applying Patches on a regular basis. Moreover Patch Management reduces the amount of time and money spent on identifying and remediating malware's.

To deploy patch management one has to keep in mind the following things,

Complete Understanding: 

To deploy Patch Management system, organizations must have an complete understanding of vulnerabilities and security issues pertaining to their software and its applications.

Scan and Detect:

Scan and detect for missing security patches

Patch Preference:

This step involves identification of suitable patch , prioritizing it and deploying .

Patch Testing:

Compatibility is important, because one may have the potential risk of losing your data in the process of patch deployment.Backing up your data before patch management may prevent your system from losing data in the process of deployment.

Management Tools:

The final step in the deployment of Patch Management system is using the right tools for the setup process.While choosing management tools organizations must look for certain aspects, such as tools which are already existing ,the number of systems to be supported and platforms supported.

Why Patch Management ?

WannaCry had targeted the older versions of Windows operating systems such as Windows XP and Windows 2003. It had exploited the vulnerability in them since they are unsupported by Microsoft. Anticipating this threat, Microsoft had issued a patch on March 2017. Operating systems which had installed these patches were not compromised.

Hence installing patches is one of the best methods to protect your systems from malware's such as Wannacry.

Does Follow The Sun model works well for MSP's?

What is Follow the Sun Model?

                 Follow The Sun Model (FTS) is a method in which the workload is distributed to companies located across the world. The aspect of varied time zone makes the 24/7 support easier. This method is adhered to, by many managed service providers in various countries. Follow the Sun model is of great use to managed service providers, because it simplifies the workflow and at the same time reduces delays. There are many advantages involved in adopting this model,

Support

        The main advantage of FTS model is support availability. It provides support whenever the customer is in need of it. It ensures increase in productivity levels, which consequently leads to company’s growth.

Customer Satisfaction

        This model ensures customer satisfaction since it ensures support is available 24/7.

Time

        It reduces the time period involved in completing a project since the work is done round-the-clock across the globe.

Peer Review

          Frequent peer checking enhances quality. Peer review can be achieved in many other ways but the turn around time in this model is a real advantage and thus it enhances the quality of the work done.

Cost Reduction

          It reduces software licensing costs. In certain situations, the cost of software tools equals a significant proportion of the project cost. This is often true for Managed Service Providers. There is a possible way to distribute the license costs over more than one-time zone thereby reducing the total number of licenses required. 

            

FTS can be implemented when one needs to create a global team. It can be implemented even while trying to forge stronger links between two businesses. Irrespective of its complexity, follow-the-sun model is widely accepted and successfully implemented by most of the Managed Service Providers.

Why IT Infrastructure Offshoring

 

According to Business Line, the online survey conducted by a private firm for 145 executives from various industries revealed, more than 30 per cent of the respondents planning to offshore their IT infrastructure in the next 12 months and another 30 percent researching or evaluating the same with active interest.

The need for mid to large size enterprises to take care of their IT Infrastructure through their outsourced partners is more convenient and reliable as they can focus on their core business.

Various Global leaders and organisations prefer IT Infrastructure offshoring as they have gained confidence to offshore new and complex service lines like IT infrastructure management and critical business processes in the last couple of years.

At Fourth Dimensions, we believe that no enterprise can truly become an ace at running its own IT Infrastructure business and monitoring as their core focus is on their own business line.

We provide a combination of onsite support with remote monitoring. This helps our clients to run their business smoothly and their core teams can focus on their critical business lines.

Another factor, that contributes is the better margins and low investment for enterprises.  The outsourcing of IT work allows companies to meet their IT needs without adding internal staff or investing in new IT infrastructure initiatives.

Wisely planned and chosen offshoring can be a key strategy for enterprises to remain in a strong position against the competitors and of course strengthen their position in the market.

·  Enhance productivity and efficiency of the IT infrastructure

·  Improved business-critical service availability

·  Measured service quality through well-defined SLAs

·  Skip day to day operations and focus on innovation

·  Reduction in overall risk

·  Increased flexibility and capacity for future business needs

·  Access to skilled resources to ramp-up or ramp-down based on business demands

·  Resultant increase in application availability

·  Improved business user satisfaction

The need for 24x7 Operations and its Implications

The need for 24x7 Operations and its Implications

Market dynamics and changing competitive equations prompt business, both small and big, to go for round-the-clock operations. However, 24/7 operations doesn’t work for all businesses. The decision to go for a 24/7 operation involves considering economic, strategic and long-term goals. Also, the decision may stand on a simple reason of being financially viable and profitable for the current period. While some businesses have the advantage of analyzing and deciding on what they need to do as far as 24/7 operations are concerned, some are bound by the compulsions of being in their respective lines of business or location. Thus, businesses near highways, airports or even manufacturing hubs find it almost essential to be open full time to make the situation beneficial for them. 

Many processes are required to operate continuously, especially in manufacturing, healthcare, hospitality and some retail industries. With the technological advancements driven competitive demands, 24/7 operation has become a necessity for many organizations looking for an advantage in the global marketplace. Thus, businesses working for customers in different time zones are bound to run 24/7 operations. Working in shifts is common in such organizations.

The key motivation to go for 24/7 operations; remains profit.

Other than that multiple factors are considered when deciding in favor or against going for round-the-clock operations. In cases where businesses may need to purchase heavy equipment and invest major capital to avoid running full time, full-time operations are preferred to save the hard cash.

Some reasons for considering 24/7 operations are its ultimate benefits too. For example, increased utilization of capital investment, improvements in customer service, and sizable operational advantage, especially when labor costs do not matter much, are the benefits that crop up as reasons for choosing full time running. However, with benefits there are counter implications that need to be looked on.

Implications of Running 24/7

The challenges of running round-the-clock operations extend beyond the obvious. Employee fatigue is one of the most underestimated adverse effect of 24/7 operations. It has not only financial costs but also business costs in terms of increased errors, accidents, legal liability, turnover, healthcare costs, labor relations, and absenteeism. Generally, all such costs of human fatigue are not estimated in advance, which leads to budgetary failure. Organizations experienced in round-the-clock operations quantify these costs and include in their decision-making processes. Costs of reduced productivity, impaired quality, damaged equipment and increased scrap and rework are quantified and added to the estimates and budgetary provisions. Apart from this, staff training on physiological principles of alertness, sleep and fatigue is required.

Other major challenges for the organization running 24/7 operations are creating a uniform culture, instilling common values across all shifts, and implementing common operating standard. Issues can emerge on the front of employee morale, operational safety, productivity, and quality control because of variation in management, training, employee motivation and culture.

Some technical but serious issues also crop up due to 24/7 working. Some of these are pay issues because of confusion in definition of workday for each shift and calculations about overtime. To overcome such issues, technology becomes the backbone of the solution chosen. In such cases, technology support is most essential as a 24/7 operation does not have downtime. Innumerous situations and scenarios can make it highly confusing to calculate extra pay, shift pay, or holiday pay. It is important to resolve pay issues quickly and effectively. Thus, various custom time and attendance systems are used after making them compatible with the requirements.

There is a lot that comes with the running of 24/7 operations, and there goes a lot to make the operations happen. For an objective mind, it goes like running parallel businesses that are management back to back.

With an expertise of over 25 years, Fourth Dimension Technologies has emerged as a noteworthy specialist delivering distinguished 24/7 support to its clients across the globe.

Our facility is staffed round the clock by seasoned support experts with extensive experience across a broad range of technologies and equipment vendors. Leveraging best practices including ITIL advanced service automation capabilities and intelligent monitoring and management tools, our services allow you to ANTICIPATE, IDENTIFY & RESOLVE system issues more quickly and with greater accuracy while maintaining the price competitiveness and control over your operations. Thus, you get an improved SLA through reduced cost and increased processes efficiency.

Let us take care of your IT fort while you focus on your core business objectives.

 

The Cloud Transition - An Opportunity for MSPs?

The Cloud Transition - An Opportunity for MSPs? 

The acceptance of cloud has transformed the way businesses plan and perform their operations. The benefits offered by cloud, such as cost savings and mobility, have given these business room to target more and have more flexibility. Even small players and startups prefer cloud to enjoy its advantages over traditional system, which means financial advantages of shifting from a CAPEX to an OPEX model. With this spurt in interest in public cloud, some Managed Service Providers (MSPs) are unable to cope with the new scenarios that have emerged. It is important for them to understand the transformation to the cloud and the market for cloud hosting products and services.

The good news is cloud is more of an opportunity for the MSPs. In fact, MSPs should themselves push their clients to migrate to the cloud and get early understanding and advantages of the cloud transformation. Cloud computing has introduced a whole gamut of services for channel providers to sell, on a subscription basis. The cloud market is undergoing rapid transformation, and MSPs realize this and thus are demanding more from their cloud service provider. In terms of availability, scalability and security, public cloud infrastructure can be rated high. Thus, this proposition is found attractive by MSPs and their clients.

SO HOW IS CLOUD TRANSITION AN OPPORTUNITY FOR THE MSPs?

Beyond Reselling Cloud Services 

Service providers and system integrators are going to be the dominant delivery vehicle for the cloud. Thus, for MSPs, the biggest opportunities lie in reselling Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure as an infrastructure solution, offer customer billing and Reserve Instance (RI) modeling to get a firm customer base.

In addition to reselling these platforms, MSPs can also offer managing and remediation services. This requires making regular optimizations, recommendations, and implementing policy management to get an optimum mix of cost, performance, capacity, and security. Services like automatically identifying and terminating unattached volumes that are being paid for, identifying and stopping or downsizing the underutilized instances, and cost modeling for optimized costing are some of the instances of offerings. Also, there is a huge scope of providing value-added services that were not required in a private data center setting.

Migration Assistance & Full Service Model 
MSPs can help their clients who are migrating from a private data center to the cloud by offering assistance. They can be the trusted partners of their clients during the migration phase; and even after that, they can do all policy management, governance and optimization with service-level management. This would essentially mean going for a full 24/7 service model to let the end customer be totally hands-free.

Technical Expertise for Cloud Transition 
Managing the technical expertise required for cloud transition by small enterprises is not an easy task. Thus, MSPs have a role crafted for this. It is up to them to grab this opportunity. However, getting experts can be a hard task.

Managing Security Risks
2016 has proved to be the year of ransomware with many businesses and enterprises getting attacked. In February, a ransomware attack made Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center pay $17,000 to regain access to its files. All businesses want to be saved from any such kind of threat. This creates an opportunity for MSPs to offer a variety of security services, such as email security, spam filtering, and firewalls. To overcome a ransomware attack without paying to the hackers, restoring to a recent backup can be a solution. Thus, MSPs can offer backup services as well.

Also bundling of services as value packages and creating recurring revenue can be done with some smart moves. MSPs, like HCL, are making an intentional move to next-generation tools to get ahead of the cloud race and take the challenge of managing complex IT infrastructure.

Other Services
MSPs can bundle, extend, and resell multiple IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-service) offerings, including Active Directory, computing, and disaster recovery. Among these, IT disaster recovery is of extreme interest to businesses of all sizes. Thus, MSPs can leverage the opportunity by providing low-cost cloud storage.

Overall, although some MSPs have a conservative outlook toward cloud adaptation and are worried about their revenues, many MSPs have already fetched good returns due to early re-orientation of their business model and services. In IT services industry, change is rapid and inevitable. Thus, MSPs should always be ready to change and gain.

Automation and its Impact on Managed Services

Automation and its Impact on Managed Services 

Automation in IT infrastructure and services is growing at rapid pace while tools and technology are constantly evolving. IT Process Automation (ITPA) involves automating a number of IT-related tasks with an aim to minimize inefficiencies and maximize productivity. There is always a business situation that needs to be addressed to streamline processes and eliminate unnecessary costs. ITPA mainly helps businesses come out of such situations easily and reduces labor-intensive manual tasks.

Managed service providers (MSPs) are always at the crossroads of technology change and thus have to deal with the automation as a major change. To meet commitments on service levels and ensure profitability, MSPs constantly jostle with time, cost, and accuracy in resolving incidents. In such a scenario, service automation can be great deal for MSPs to manage processes remotely across sites through multiple channels. Also, in a super saturated industry, it is necessary for MSPs to reduce costs and transfer the benefit to their customers. This can be perfectly done by adopting automation.

IT process automation helps MSPs in a number of ways:

 • Maximizes Productivity: Automation of IT processes helps do away with manual tasks, thus saving operations time and increasing productivity.

• Brings More Value to Customers: MSPs can pass the savings earned through automation to their customers, thus offering better service at a lower price. As a result, customers have more value per unit spent.

 • Makes Cloud Transition Easier for Clients: Moving to cloud from traditional setup is a complicated process for many enterprises. ITPA reduces the complexity by a substantial level and helps MSPs make cloud transition smooth for their clients and thus earn their trust.

 • Optimizes Resources: With automation, MSPs are able to serve their clients quicker with fewer people. They are able to manage multiple locations with consistent and equivalent control and support.

 • Facilitates Consistency: ITPA increases output consistency and improves system recovery time. This translates into improved service levels for the provider as there is less downtime.

 • Provides Managed Control: Automating does not take control away from the management, rather gives room for managed control. The management can choose to include human checkpoints for taking decisions at various levels of the workflow. At these checkpoints, the process owners are presented the current information via SMS, email, IM or phone and allowed to take the next step for the process to proceed.

• Helps with Easy Customization: MSPs can choose to use available automation workflows for common IT functions and customize more complicated processes that are specific to their line of business. This helps to be put efforts only on the required and core processes and improve their overall resource utilization and profitability.

With more technological solutions coming up to manage their work more efficiently and cost-effectively, MSPs are accepting changes for better sustainability. Automation, in general, and ITPA, in particular, will be the most suitable ways for MSPs to achieve this goal.