The headline in the Toronto Star on Thursday, January 9 said it all “Canada viewed as Safe Haven for Cloud Computing”.  With more and more companies including cloud as part of their data and application management strategy, Canada is poised to pick up a large segment of business from a weary US market who have experienced security violations or who are “spooked by the National Security Agency (NSA) spying scandal”. According to Daniel Castro, a senior analyst with the Washington based Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, US firms could stand to lose as much as $35 billion in lost revenues over three years.

While this is bad news for US cloud service companies, it is a welcome message for Canadian Managed Services providers who have spent the last several years building infrastructure and offerings that have been designed around the strict compliance and security requirements that Canadian governments and businesses demand.

And while Managed Services in Canada can promise security, redundancy, business continuity and disaster recovery for your data center operations, it also spells-out better cost efficiencies around people management and insight into corporate KPIs that you might be missing out on today.

When companies choose a Canadian supplier for Managed Services, security around data is simply one of the benefits. Aberdeen reports that best-in-class organizations using Managed Services are experiencing greater efficiencies than businesses who try to do it all themselves.

Applications and Services 24/7

There was a promise made many years ago that as we embraced the technology revolution, we would be positioned to have simpler lives. It would give us more down-time and enable us to pursue greater work/life balance because there would be fewer manual tasks and more automation. The reality is that advancements in technology have changed our expectations and demands. We have an “always on” mentality, expecting 24/7 access to business and consumer-based applications.

The burden to make all of this happen falls on IT. And with shrinking budgets and resources, what this means is that IT is tasked to do a whole lot more with a whole lot less.

Turning to Managed Services

There trend in the past of implementing mega-outsourcing deals where entire IT departments were scuttled in favour of a large organization stepping in as an “acting” IT division have been replaced with a blended model that uses contingent workers. While a flexible workforce can provide benefits such as addressing a talent gap or delivering on a project, navigating the complexities of managing a contingent team has become increasingly complex with many organizations focusing on only the full-time employees, unable to implement processes and procedures needed to ensure corporate goals are realized across a blended team.

In recent research by industry leader Aberdeen, they recommend that organizations move to an MSP model to solve the problem of driving objectives, meeting business goals, improving efficiencies, leveraging insight and realizing consistency while appropriately managing a combined team of full-time and contingent workers.

Aberdeen’s research illustrated that organizations who approach their contingency workforce model by leveraging the services of an MSP are more likely to reduce overall costs while achieving other benefits such as better processes, better visibility and better control around compliance. Ensuring Service Level Agreements (SLAs) are met, managing to corporate KPIs and having tested Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Plans documented and implemented increases the value proposition.

Not All Managed Services Providers are Equal

Navantis offers a full suite of Managed Services that can range from a simple Incident Management Help Desk solution through to a fully optimized Virtual Data Center strategy. From redundant and secure data centers located strategically across Canada, we deliver the most unique, flexible and secure set of offerings in the Canadian market today. Trusted and used by some of the largest names in the business, we were the proud recipients recently of the International Business Award (Stevie) for our ability to deliver unprecedented business intelligence to Line of Business managers who needed better insight into operations.

Summary

For IT to meet their objectives, they will need to augment internal teams with contingent resources. Leveraging the value of a Canadian-based Managed Service Provider can deliver security, redundancy, insight, best practice, and improvements meeting SLAs more cost-effectively than managing resources internally. Calling Navantis can expose you to a flexible suite of Managed Services unavailable at many of our competitors. Download our White Paper today.

This post was written by Adis Tucakovic
Adis Tucakovic is the VP, Managed Services. Adis is a strong business and technical leader with 12 years of progressive experience in IT Consulting, Sales and Management roles with hands-on technical and program management experience. Adis is an accredited Microsoft Certified Master in Exchange Server, Microsoft IT Professional and Technology Specialist in SharePoint and Lync Server.