- Greg Hall
- Reading Time: 4 minutes
As managed services (both infrastructure and application support) providers adapt their go-to-market strategies, customers must plan ahead to properly form their I&O strategy.
Corporate data centers have moved to the forefront of strategic planning and targeted investment decisions for your managed infrastructure services. Infrastructure and Operations (I&O) models must empower businesses to embrace the digital age, innovate, and integrate their cloud-first strategies.
The end is here for the traditional infrastructure support model of procuring, provisioning, and supporting in-house infrastructure that enables new and upgraded enterprise software. Several developments in the infrastructure managed services space are shaking up the landscape, including:
- Innovations
- Digital transformations
- Navigating provider costs, commercials, and competencies
- Cloud-based infrastructure offerings like security-as-a-service
- The emergence of hyperscalers
I&O managed service providers are also changing their go-to-market strategies in reaction to these disruptors. As a result, companies must stay abreast of changing provider strategies, think strategically, and plan accordingly to enable this I&O transformation.
Let’s explore each disruptor and its impact in reshaping the very core of infrastructure as it exists today.
Digital Transformation
As enterprise application providers, like SAP and Oracle, move their product suites to cloud-based subscription solutions, multiple traditional I&O towers of support materially change. The largest impact comes from a company’s core investments in servers and storage, though network, security, and application management services (AMS) are also affected. In the case of SAP S/4HANA digital transformations, companies now have multiple hosting options for their SAP infrastructure:
- Stay on-premises and leverage existing internal support teams or I&O managed services providers (MSPs)
- Use SAP RISE to host SAP infrastructure
- Engage and contract separately with a hyperscaler for physical infrastructure, while selecting an MSP(s) to support BASIS, cloud managed services, and application support.
Digital transformations are fundamentally reshaping both infrastructure and application support strategies for many companies. As enterprise applications require the most infrastructure to run and the most effort to support, moving that footprint to the cloud creates an opportunity for companies to reassess their entire application support and infrastructure support strategies.
Moving to the cloud affords CIOs the opportunity to look for provider synergies across application management, cloud managed services, remaining infrastructure services, and transformation/migration services. Key strategic sourcing decisions need to be made upfront to enable transformation. Transition lead times, product roadmaps, and vendor consolidations all need to factor into those decisions and sourcing strategies.
The As-a-Service Model
The push to cloud-based software solutions has spawned a myriad of as-a-service models that each look to leverage software to support traditional I&O functions like network support, security, and data.
Network-as-a-service (NaaS) allows companies to leverage OpEx and cloud-based software solutions/subscriptions. It also allows companies to move away from the traditional network model of purchasing, deploying, configuring, and maintaining corporate-owned CapEx investments in network hardware and software.
In a world that is going fully digital, cloud-based software solutions like this are fast becoming part of a company’s strategic roadmap for adoption as the fabric of I&O connectivity and data flows move in and out of the cloud. Software-defined wide area networking (SD-WAN) and secure access service edge (SASE) architecture-based solutions are now dominating this space, while legacy network players like Cisco worked to bring their own SaaS bundled solutions to market.
Complementing the wave of NaaS solutions disrupting the I&O model are security-as-a-service solutions. As sources of solution-based systems move to various cloud platforms, the need for always secure connectivity is also presenting an opportunity for the introduction of security-as-a-service solutions that can remotely secure and manage those connections and data exchanges.
Costs, Commercials, and Competencies
Companies are conducting critical and thorough comparisons of costs between managed services providers. Examining their pre-existing relationships, companies are trying to balance the strength of the commitments or incentives their provider is promising with the risks that come with selecting a specific provider. In an I&O strategy, this often manifests in negotiating key commercial terms with your chosen provider.
There are concerns on the competency side for companies that not only have immerging technologies, but who need support in surges of demand. Companies have a habit of falling to their existing relationships for support in their transformations, but it is critical to assess your own competencies and sensitivities to change so you can choose a provider that compliments your own capabilities or, at the very least, understands where they may need to course correct due to incompetency.
Hyperscalers
As existing software providers move to SaaS models and new software providers embrace the SaaS model, the hyperscalers, namely AWS, GCP, and Microsoft Azure, are providing the infrastructure compute power to host and transact in the cloud. As the hyperscalers expand their reach beyond partnering with SaaS providers to infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), they are becoming the enabler of I&O’s move to the cloud, specifically for servers and storage I&O towers.
While hyperscalers provide the physical infrastructure, companies will still need I&O managed services to provide select I&O support of their cloud-based infrastructure to manage, monitor, and support the applications installed.
Innovation
The wave of innovation taking place in the I&O space is an incredibly impactful disruptor in the current market, namely for application support and service/help desk towers. With the accelerating pace of AI adoption, companies need to evaluate their own AI strategies and tools along with those of the provider community.
These innovation tools extend far beyond AI to areas like the internet of things (IoT), augmented reality (AR), robotic process automation (RPA), and more. Factoring these technologies into your I&O negotiation strategy will best position companies to align core capabilities that enable business outcomes through innovation.
Determining when and how these tools will be incorporated into your infrastructure roadmap will have a direct impact on a company’s ability to maximize the benefits of transformation.
Reimagining Platforms and Services
I&O managed services providers are changing in response to these disruptors and, in some cases, are reinventing their go-to-market strategies. They are establishing new relationships with other providers, acquiring new talent, and upskilling their employees.
