How Managed Services Can Supersize Your IT Team: Four Real-World Success Stories

Today, technology touches every operational aspect of the modern enterprise. Businesses across all industries and specializations depend on it, amplifying the growing need for skilled professionals to construct, maintain, and protect the tech infrastructures that will power tomorrow.

But the issue at hand isn’t the rising demand for tech talent, it’s the lack thereof. This shortage has companies in a frenzy as they try to retain their existing tech workforce while struggling to find individuals with the precise skills required to navigate the complex world of modern technology.

While big-tech layoffs and hiring freezes indicate that we might be int he midst of a slowdown, the tech industry shows no signs of cooling. With tech job postings 25% higher than they were the previous year, the reality on the ground looks much different for tech leaders in search of skilled talent. In fact, a recent survey conducted by McKinsey & Company revealed that more than 44% of high-profile organizations expect the talent shortage to become even more dire in the next five years. 

From software architects to DevOps engineers, and many positions in between, the talent shortage has led to a situation where only 65 positions out of every 100 open job roles get filled. The impact? Many of today’s companies are struggling to attract, hire, and maintain the tech talent they need to manage, optimize, and enhance the IT environment they rely on to drive growth and innovation.

Unique Challenges Demand a Custom Solution

In a typical IT environment, the areas in need of management and optimization—from network and infrastructure management, to security services and application development, to data backup and recovery, and everything in between—often seem to outnumber available personnel, leaving IT teams with a never-ending to-do list. In this reality, IT professionals who are on staff are usually left just trying to keep the lights on, with no time to devote to higher-level projects that will drive business outcomes and growth.

Complicating matters, there are many specialized areas of IT that are extremely important but aren’t required on a full-time basis. Because companies often can’t afford to bring on these specialized skill sets, even if they wanted to, many of these areas become neglected. Other times, these specific skill sets can be difficult to find the right tallent for

Unique IT challenges such as these require a custom solution—and many organizations are finding it in managed services, which enable organizations to outsource specific IT operations to a third-party provider. In fact, recent research from KPMG found that 75% of companies expect to increase spending on managed services in the next two years.

Breaking Down the Benefits of Managed Services

Managed services complement a company’s internal team and accelerate transformation with a combination of expertise, technologies, and proven methodologies delivered in a flexible, scalable support model. Modern managed services providers (MSPs) give companies the option to outsource the entirety of an IT task—cloud infrastructure management, for example—or take advantage of a fractionalized resource model, where they can get the skills they need, when they need them, at a more affordable price point (because you’re only paying for resources when you’re actually using them vs. hiring full-time, in-house personnel).

The right MSP partner will allow you to pick and choose the roles and services you need on any given day, adjusting resources based on changing business demands to achieve a tailored program that drives the business. And this means in-house IT staff is freed from the burden of “run and maintain” tasks and can instead focus on optimizing and securing IT environments as well as driving innovation. Here are a few additional benefits of managed services:

• Eliminate the need to hire and retain hard-to-find expertise
• Leverage on-demand access to specialized expertise to fill gaps or augment teams
• Reduce operational costs while tapping into new capabilities and outcomes
• Utilize a cost-efficient model that adjusts to organizational needs
• Maintain strong governance with proven best practices, security controls and reporting
• Benefit from flexible contract terms and conditions to support how your business operates

Real-World Results with Managed Services

According to the previously cited KPMG survey, 86% of companies cite savings and innovation as top goals for using managed services—and these services empower companies to achieve both of these objectives and much more. To illustrate the transformative impact managed services can exert on your business, here are five real-world stories that showcase the remarkable outcomes attainable through their implementation.

American Cast Iron Pipe Company (American): With a long-term goal of consolidating its entire business on JD Edwards (JDE), American brought Navisite on as a hosting and services partner to support the migration of three business divisions to a modern JDE EnterpriseOne ERP on Amazon Web Services (AWS) as well as to provide ongoing management of JDE on the cloud. Today, Navisite continues to manage AMERICAN’s EnterpriseOne environment on AWS, from the operating system and database level through the application and development support. This helps American ensure a high-performance, steady state of is mission-critical systems. Read the full case study here.

“We don’t have the bandwidth and expertise to manage all aspects of our JDE infrastructure, but with Navisite, we can.”

John Barnhart, CIO, AMERICAN

Retrieve Technologies, Inc. (Retrieve): With Retrieve’s business growing rapidly, the company knew it would have to augment its DevOps team if it wanted to keep pace with demand. Rather than invest in hiring and training additional DevOps and site reliability engineers, Retrieve moved to a managed services model with Navisite, leveraging Navisite’s DevOps services to cost-effectively access expertise. Once on board, Navisite’s DevOps team immediately began working as an extension of Retrieve’s internal team, stepping up wherever help was needed. Now, Retrieve can operate cost-effectively with a small team and leverage Navisite for additional help and expertise. For example, Navisite’s DevOps engineers have become the first line of support for Retrieve when alerts come in, creating a clear escalation path that ensure its production infrastructure is always operating at 100%. Read the full case study here.

“Our DevOps team is small, so we looked to Navisite to augment our team and help manage our environment at scale.”

Kiarna Boyd, IT consultant, Retrieve

Global Blood Therapeutics (GBT): GBT called on Navisite to help migrate 10 servers running on legacy infrastructure in an on-premises data center to AWS. The Navisite team architected GBT’s cloud environment, mapped out a phased approach and then helped execute a successful migration. Today, GBT is taking advantage of Navisite’s Cloud DevOps services, with engineers responsible for managing GBT’s environments on AWS, ensuring servers and applications are running smoothly, making sure infrastructure is highly available and reliable, and monitoring and managing the security of GBT’s virtual private cloud on AWS. Additionally, GBT is benefiting from Navisite’s AWS Cloud Optimization Service (ACO) to drive efficiencies, cost-savings, and performance with an environment that is rightsized and fully optimized on the cloud. Read the full case study here.

“From Navisite’s AWS migration expertise to their ongoing DevOps and cloud optimization services, they have proven to be a true partner helping us continually succeed on the cloud.”

William Ge, director of informatics, GBT

Clinigen Limited (Clinigen): Clinigen took a cloud-first approach to support its global distribution model—and implementing Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS) on AWS was key to this strategy. Due to the complex nature of the Oracle EBS implementation, Clinigen relied on Navisite to guide the project with minimal risk and downtime. Navisite’s cloud experts helped Clinigen successfully develop, pilot, test and implement its Oracle EBS database and applications in Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). Following the migration, Clinigen tapped Navisite to become its hosting services partner, providing ongoing managed services for the company’s AWS environment as well as for the database running Oracle EBS. Clinigen is also leveraging Navisite’s ACO Service to continually optimize its Oracle EBS environment to support the optimal use of resources and meet the needs of existing and changing services over time. Read the full case study here.

“Navisite does everything from infrastructure management and support, to ‘keep the lights on’ activities, including backup and recovery and deployment of new functionality and updates. Working with Navisite is a genuine partnership.”

Andy Parker, VP of IT, Clinigen

A Trusted MSP Partner

Navisite is a trusted MSP partner for more than 1,500 companies. With more than 20 years of experience as an MSP, we offer a robust portfolio of end-to-end managed services, including infrastructure modernization, cloud transformation, data intelligence and automation, application and database services, and cybersecurity services. And our technology is backed by an unrivaled team of experts that provide 24/7 services and support.

Navisite has the experience, expertise, and services to help you navigate change, achieve cost and operational efficiency, and drive business outcomes. Check out the full scope of our managed services to learn more.