The foundations of managed IT services

During my latest livestream I talked about working as a managed IT service provider. I have worked in managed IT services for more than 20 years. It is 04:46 in the morning in Ireland, and I felt like sharing my thoughts on this profession and its foundations again, in a different format…

You can find the video version on YouTube:

Watch the video on YouTube

For many, working as a managed IT service provider means « only » administering, partly or entirely, on the client's behalf, infrastructure and/or applications. Yet, beyond « keeping things operational » 24/7, the handling of updates, of backups and of security, and other elements that generally appear in the description of managed IT services, these actors of the cloud ecosystem play a crucial role, and understanding the true nature of this work takes many years of doing it.

On the surface, these are simply technical services intended to ensure an optimal level of availability, of security, as well as of performance of the client's infrastructure and/or applications.

To get there, managed IT services are (generally) divided into 3 main activities: the build (designing and then installing infrastructure), the run (keeping infrastructure operational, including monitoring and incident response), and technical support (handling specific requests, from troubleshooting to optimising and developing platforms, with advice tailored to each request).

In practice, there is more below the surface of the iceberg, particularly industrialization and automation, with the objective of continuously improving the overall quality of the service. The focus is generally on service resilience: both the ability to withstand incidents, and to return to a « normal » state afterwards.

Many think this profession has changed enormously in recent years and will change even more in the future. I disagree. While technology, scope and offerings evolve, the foundations of this profession remain the same and have not changed for more than 20 years. I firmly believe they will stay that way over the coming decades. So, for anyone interested, let us meet again in about twenty years and talk about it.

The foundation of managed IT services is, in my view, about eliminating stress and dissatisfaction, not only for clients, but also for their teams, users, partners and their own clients, while allowing them to concentrate solely on their core business.

Thus, a software publisher will be able to use its time to innovate and implement new features, while an online sales platform will be able to concentrate on the promotion of its brand, of its products, and the development of its community…

For their part, financial institutions will be able to concentrate on the processing of their data while benefiting from a high-performance and secure environment that will allow them to protect themselves from internal as well as external threats, while the Media will be able to focus on the creation of content, without worrying about the availability and accessibility of what they produce.

To be certain of eliminating this stress and this dissatisfaction, while letting clients focus on their own work, the managed IT service provider must emphasise 2 fundamental elements of his approach: problem solving and anticipation. These two factors are in my view the founding pillars of this trade. Thus, even if the technology, the processes, and the offers evolve, managed IT services will continue to rest on them.

The contract may cover a broader or narrower scope and different options depending on the provider: installing, creating and delivering environments, checking logs and configurations, security and feature updates, corrective and preventive maintenance, optimising services and systems, industrialisation and scalability. But beyond that, whether operating at a « local » or « industrial » scale, a managed IT service provider is certainly no ordinary partner.

The notion of trust that is built between a managed IT service provider and his client is extremely strong: the managed IT service provider is a bit like the butler who lives in the house and has a copy of every key.

In this relationship, trust is therefore essential, but it does not only concern the provider and client; it also concerns the partners and suppliers with whom the managed IT service provider works, and more particularly the suppliers of infrastructure building blocks.

This trust is built through several elements, including:

– The technical elements (quality of the infrastructure, of the datacenters, of the hardware, of the network)
– The human elements (skills, availability, and accessibility of the corresponding teams)
– And finally the values and the culture of the company, which must remain compatible and ideally symbiotic between the cloud provider and the managed IT service provider.

Together, over time, these elements build trust and a real partnership that goes beyond the binary « client/supplier » relationship.

And it is on the basis of these elements that I have chosen, throughout my life as an entrepreneur, my trusted partners for my different activities in this field, whether they concern ScalarX or Digital Network.

Some are short-lived: they gradually fade as one or more of these elements evolve or change. Others, on the contrary, last and strengthen with time: one example is my relationship with OVHcloud, with whom I have been working for nearly 22 years.

On that note, I will end this post. I hope you found it interesting. I am going to call it a night and relax a little. Have a great weekend, everyone.

Christophe Casalegno

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