Thursday, 12 March 2015 Blog ehdf

Managed Services Here To Stay

In today’s business environment, organizations need to adopt new technologies in order to expand their operations and improve productivity and customer experience. Even small to mid-size organizations will not be able to function, let alone scale-up their businesses without a strong IT infrastructure to support their growth. Many companies do not have the required resources to support a dedicated in-house IT team. Faced with mounting costs and an increasingly complex IT environment to manage, organizations are now more than ever looking at Managed IT Services as an alternative to in-house IT infrastructure management.

Why Managed IT Services?

Managed IT Services offer companies multiple benefits at the strategic, operational and financial level:

• At the strategic level, it allows companies to focus and leverage their resources towards their core business activities, rather than spending too much time on operational activities.

• At the operational level, it offers the skills and expertise of a service provider to competently manage complex data centre requirements.

• At the financial level, Managed IT Services reduce total cost of ownership and provide the benefit of a subscription based OPEX model.

Uptake and Trends

The Managed IT Services market in the UAE is seeing an increased uptake. Traditionally, large businesses have been relying on the expertise and services of Managed Services providers to offer secure, flexible and scalable solutions. However, over the last few years, there has been a growing trend amongst SMEs choosing to work with Service Providers for their data centre requirements – a large part of which is due to the cost effectiveness that managed services offer.

Also, the UAE continues to dominate the Managed Services market in the GCC and is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of around 17 per cent over the next five years, this is up from 12.9 per cent in 2011 – the acceleration is due to the increasing demand from core growth industries such as retail, healthcare, and manufacturing. Data center hosting makes up approximately 18 per cent of the Managed Services market revenue in the UAE.

Many more customers from a number of industry verticals are adopting Managed IT services. Sectors in Banking and Finance, Aviation, Media, Government, IT and Telecom in particular, have taken to managed services as ensuring a secure and reliable system is critical.

The remote IT infrastructure services model is also gaining prominence. This model allows service providers to remotely monitor and manage a company’s IT assets, ensuring 24/7 availability and completely supported infrastructure.