Managed Services vs. DIY: Take the Stress Out of Maintaining your Environment

Given the changing nature of global business models throughout 2020, it’s clear there is a common theme amongst IT organisations to do more with less. I wrote about this topic in one of my previous blogs, found here.  

To meet this challenge, there’s a strong trend that considers (or re-considers) the move towards outsourced Managed Services. As part of this consideration, organisations inevitably need to fully explore the costs of providing, managing and maintaining environments themselves (DIY) vs utilising the services of an external provider for Managed Services.

At first glance it can be quite eye-opening to review a proposal to pay a fixed annual cost for three, five or more years, especially when you may not have all the data available. In addition, you might even feel unsure of what the future may look like in three or five years. It’s your responsibility to ensure you use your budget as efficiently as possible, but how do you begin to compare the two options?

When examining the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of the two approaches (Managed Services vs. DIY), the following four points are key to understanding the cost difference:

• Staff costs
• Operational costs
• Invisible opportunity costs
• Knowledge and training costs

Managed Services vs. DIY: Staff Costs

The first category is the staffing costs associated with having a team manage and maintain an environment.

Costs for a highly skilled team

The first, and most obvious cost, incurred by any business are those associated with employing staff (e.g. wages, taxes, leave). Staffing is needed to manage, operate, secure and enhance your environments.

Depending upon your environment and its associated nuances (i.e. complexity, requirements for specific domain knowledge, size of environment) you may find yourself needing a team of highly paid and specialised people. This staff, albeit a necessity, come with direct and indirect costs.

You should also consider the recruitment costs of finding and attracting these people, which are also factors that will greatly increase the TCO for a DIY approach.

Help your staff drive business value

By engaging and partnering with a Managed Services provide such as NICE Actimize, the staffing requirements, costs and challenges for maintaining your environment will no longer be your responsibility. Under this model, you can retain and attract staff who drive, develop and add business value (e.g. core product development), and can safely leave the undifferentiated heavy lifting, such as the patching, maintenance and incident response, to your Managed Services partner.

Minimise resource risk

Another key consideration is that under a Managed Services engagement, you’re partnering with a team to constantly and consistently manage your environment. Compare and contrast this to a common DIY approach, which has a much higher risk by relying on the knowledge, ability and availability of one or two people in your organisation for business continuity.

Managed Services vs. DIY: Operational Costs

The second category is the operational costs associated with operating and maintaining your environment.

Daily operations, monitoring and maintenance

This covers the factors relating to “supporting services” such as monitoring and the day-to-day healthcare and optimisation of your environment.

Often these are not core to your business, but are required for ongoing operation and maintenance of your environment. Under the DIY approach, these supporting services detract from the business value-add activities your staff could be focusing on.

The DIY approach requires your business to take on these additional costs (and distractions), which may be better spent on your core product or service offering.

Technical debt

Another common occurrence is staff being time poor and unable to focus on, tune or maintain the internal DIY supporting services. This contributes to your TCO in the form of technical debt, often manifesting itself in out-of-date solutions, which aren’t fully configured or used – all while you’re still paying for it.

Save operational costs with NICE Actimize Managed Services

Compare this to our NICE Actimize Managed Service engineers who use Actimize software daily. This team can ensure your environment is fully maintained and up to date (it’s in our best interests) because of our deep technical experience in working with our product set effectively day in and day out. Due to the scale and breath of NICE Actimize Managed Services, improvements and lessons learned in one managed environment can come to bear at improving the management of your environment as well.

Managed Services vs. DIY: Intangible Opportunity Costs

This third category concerns the intangible costs associated with the DIY approach.

Enable your team to focus on accelerating your business

The largest focus for your staff will be the undifferentiated heavy lifting needed to maintain the status quo and keep your services operational. What could your staff be doing instead to be adding business value and growing your company? Innovation? That new feature?

Why not refocus your team on higher value tasks that help your business accelerate, grow and succeed in the future? You don’t have to run the same operational housekeeping systems as everyone else. Shed the weight. Feel the freedom!

Resource risk

What happens when your staff member goes on leave? Does it mean that all changes to your environment are put on hold?

What happens when your staff member leaves? Did they document that last infrastructure change and admin password?

All these changes take focus away from your core business and may have a direct impact on your revenue.

Depth of expertise

With NICE Actimize Managed Services, you have a dedicated team of people who know your environment and can assist with issues as they arrive. We encourage businesses in any partnership with us to utilise the deep experience and knowledge that is available. Many environments tend to be similar and odds are that we’ve seen and solved your issue before.

Managed Services vs. DIY: Knowledge and Training Costs

The fourth category consists of the costs related to the knowledge your employees bring to your environment.

Skills costs

The final part of the jigsaw to consider is the cost to skill up and maintain the knowledge of your direct employees.

With NICE Actimize Managed Services, you can avoid those costs completely, or gain breathing room to lean on our own existing staff to make a more valued contribution.

This helps with future innovation and allows you to prepare your team for a future of unknown challenges.

Moving Forward

When evaluating whether a Managed Services engagement is the best choice for your business, it certainly helps to consider the TCO for both the DIY and MSP approach. Read more on how you can reduce operational costs with our Managed Services here.

Want to hear more? Listen to our case study discussion with Nedbank South Africa here!