There are “good” and “bad” pressures on IT. The green arrows represent the good pressure: pressure to add new business value by increasing productivity, driving customer connections, etc. The red arrows represent the “bad” pressures: the necessary, day-to-day pressures that require lots of time, resources, and effort to address but that don’t necessarily push the business ahead. It’s these pressures that consume 80 percent of most IT budgets today, according to analysts; that’s a lot of investment spent on “standing still” when you’d rather be spending resources that add new business value and take the business further.

As companies grow, their IT infrastructures grow along with them. But more often, the pace of that growth is uneven, driven as much by the conditions under which the infrastructures operate as by the models they aspire to. You add an application here. You add functionality there. You add people across the board. Yet the more variables you add to your infrastructure, the harder it can be to manage and, more importantly, to keep secure.

So even as the costs for hardware and software are going down, the costs of managing and supporting your infrastructure are increasing. In today’s competitive times, outsourcing non-core activities makes a lot of business and economic sense. Organizations are realizing that they can’t provide each and every service to their clients. As a result, they are focusing more on their core competencies and relying on service providers to manage critical but non-core processes for them. Offshore technical support can no longer be treated as a peripheral process. It requires a experienced and dedicated support team who will work around the clock to deliver higher value to customers.

In addition to this, there are many more reasons why a company should consider outsourcing. Some of the reasons are outlined below:

• Because you need to focus more on core business activities
• Because you don’t have the time to do it yourself
• Because you want to avoid the cost of new technology
• Because you want to reduce your present operating costs
• Because you want to reduce capital costs of infrastructure
• Because you want to make the best use of competitive resources available worldwide
• Because you don’t have the skills to do it yourself
• Because you want to maximize customer satisfaction
• Because you want to benefit from the provider’s expertise in solving problems for a number of clients with similar requirements

In today’s globalized and networked economy, outsourcing has never been so easy or made so much business sense. The question is not “Why outsource?” but rather, “Why not?”.

For instance, Intune highlights the ability to manage updates released by Microsoft, as well as block malware using Microsoft’s Malware Protection Engine. The buck does not stop there. It also enables technical support personnel in an organization to monitor PCs and provide remote desktop support for their users. Additionally, Intune also includes tools for tracking hardware and software inventory, including the ability to monitor assets, licenses, and compliance. It also has remote management tools like remote desktop initiated by the client through the Intune service could be very helpful for consultants and corporate IT when a remote user calls with an email problem.

From the first looks of it, the interface seems to be good which is built in Silverlight. Going to give this beta a try and see how it goes.

Remote Infrastructure Management

If studied closely, RIM makes more sense not in terms of a measure to cut costs during recessions but more as a business sense. How? Let’s see.

Today enterprises leverage the power of IT to streamline their key business processes and gain a competitive advantage. Even with the investments already made, the key issues relating to application performance, scalability, security, management and effective utilization are mostly unresolved. Apart from helping to reduce the overall IT Infrastructure Management costs, a well structured and managed RIM relationship can bring significant benefits.

Flexibility of Service
Customers hiring service providers have an advantage here as they can align the business needs with the services provided by the Service Provider. Services can be flexed to meet peak times and loads, mission-critical and non-mission critical or a combination of both. This type of flexible pricing model and service delivery helps in apportioning the infrastructure management costs.

Domain Expertise
In this highly volatile IT industry it is hard to keep up with the latest technology trends and it is almost impossible to have on pay roll a staff that can match the ever demanding and changing face of IT technology across all segments. A RIM service provider can add value here as they have diverse IT staffs which are at a client’s disposal, working 24×7. Moreover, these specialists are constantly updated with the latest technology trends via internal training programs, technical training programs from vendors, etc.

This basically helps companies to gain a competitive advantage as it helps to reduce the time to market. Companies can take the bold steps of adopting and switching to new technologies to gain a competitive advantage. Serious service providers in the RIM industry would normally have alliances in place with leading technology suppliers and as a result clients can also enjoy a single window of service from them with an assurance that the team working on their projects would be capable of handling the technology and related needs.

Visibility and Control
Companies retain full control of its strategic components such as physical IT assets, technology refresh, policy and architecture which provides visibility into the availability, performance and utilization of each component. Many of the established RIM suppliers have embraced the ITIL framework which lends itself to RIM very effectively. Putting the collected data in to this type of best practices framework provides lot of insight and visibility. This visibility further enables companies to take control of the situation, make informed decisions on future investments in IT and improve current service levels.

Reduced Costs
Remote Infrastructure Management not only assists in reducing the manpower cost of managing the infrastructure, but also brings down the costs related to future infrastructure investments. It has been reported and endorsed by agencies like McKinsey and NASSCOM that outsourcing the infrastructure management services can save dramatically reduce the labour related costs by 30% to 40%. On the other hand, companies can also reduce costs associated with future infrastructure investments using expertise of the service provider by way of infrastructure optimization, standardization using industry best practises and consolidation using virtualization technologies.

Proactive Services
Most of the time RIM services engagements are driven and governed by SLA’s (Service Level Agreements). Service providers, in order to maintain the SLA, invest in to software and technology that enable them to gain an insight on failing components in the IT infrastructure, usage patterns, thresholds, etc. These tools enable a service provider to provide 24×7 proactive monitoring and management via a Remote NOC (Network Operations Centre). This helps to resolve issues in a faster and structured manner.

So, in today’s fast paced and ever changing IT world, RIMs makes more business sense and CIOs have to step back and ask themselves what they’re trying to accomplish with infrastructure outsourcing. Cost savings, optimization, transformation or efficiency? CIO’s decisions on outsourcing infrastructure management are going to be driven by more than just cost savings and as a result it is also going to create a challenge for the service providers to tweak their service models to show more benefits and not only cost savings.