Guide. is vital - but it s not your business!

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1 is vital - but it s not your business! Businesses around the world send around 100 billion s every day and the volume shows no sign of abating any time soon. Indeed, according to research from McKinsey Global Institute, workers now spend 28% of their time, reading, writing or responding to , and a further 19% tracking down the information relevant to those responses. Whichever way you slice it, now sustains most of the everyday processes in your organisation and that s perfectly legitimate. But managing the provision and maintenance of that is not your core business it s a distraction from profitable activity! Guide

2 To put this in context, consider this: you don t run your own telephone exchange or generate your own electricity. So why does it make any kind of sense to try and manage your own ? Short answer: it doesn t, and for many reasons. The first of these is financial: Both capital expenditure (capex) and operational expenditure (opex) take a massive hit from in-house management. This is because it involves on-premise hardware, multiple skilled staff, software licensing costs, and the ongoing economic burden of hardware, software, firewall and antivirus updates and upgrades. Want the hard numbers? One recent whitepaper, summarised here, suggests that some managed solutions can save SMBs up to 94% on their monthly management costs. That s not a figure to be ignored. Guide Managed 2

3 Productivity also all too often falls victim to the limitations of in-house management: According to a report from Harvard Business Review, some 74% of business s are spam. The implications of this metric for workforce productivity are alarming, but perhaps even more surprisingly, the same report says that 42% of the s that make it into users inboxes are in fact essential. So, managing to protect business productivity is doubly complicated. It s not just about screening out the spam - it s also about intelligently filtering what remains. A mere 10% improvement in time spent dealing with would potentially free up an extra fortnight of productivity, per year, per employee! But spend time deploying and managing a solution of that power and complexity in-house and the chances are you ll rapidly eat through any productivity gains that it might initially generate. Guide Managed 3

4 Inevitably, security looms large in this debate. We don t need to tell you that the IT threat landscape evolves at breakneck speed we all read the news. But did you know... Cybercriminals still consider to be one of the most effective points of entry into organisations, and SMBs like you (not just large enterprises) are heavily targeted. In fact, findings from Trend Micro and Osterman Research have shown a 5-year increase in the number of organisations that have reported security violations through , and many of these were SMBs. Tragically, some of them subsequently had to file for bankruptcy as a consequence of the financial losses occasioned by the cyberattacks that they suffered. But can you really expect your modest IT department to manage the deployment and maintenance of anti-virus, anti-spam, outbound content filtering, data leakage protection, encryption, and protection against every other golden opportunity for malicious exploitation that every single offers? Given that global traffic is predicted to grow to over 192 billion s every day by 2016, no! Guide Managed 4

5 Yikes! But the risks stop there, right? Sadly, no. There s also the small matter of business continuity to consider. Many SMBs do what they believe is the responsible thing, and try to create backups and contingencies around their in-house solution. But the expense of doing this properly is simply way too high for most SMBs to bear. The costly pain points are many and varied here is just a brief selection: Most in-house solutions have only a single connection to the Internet if this goes down, your goes down with it Most in-house solutions do not have significant power backups to handle extended power outages If server hardware fails, most in-house solutions have few, if any, replacement parts available When it comes to retrieving data, most in-house solutions perform only simple backups and these are usually kept in the same location as the servers! These backups are also rarely tested Guide Managed 5

6 Indeed, as one industry source has commented, a truly resilient continuity system requires operating two completely separate data centers. Can your business afford that? Guide Managed 6

7 So what are the benefits of managed and where s the proof? Not all providers offer the same range of services, of course, but this table serves to paint a generic picture of what your business stands to gain from managed vs. in-hous In-house implementation Typical managed solution Financial investment Large financial investment, often totalling many thousands of pounds, for hardware, software licences, IT resources and more. Maintenance costs unpredictable Initial costs are minimal - no hardware or software required, no need for additional IT personnel. Ongoing fees tend to be low, predictable and easy to budget for, even in periods of rapid organisational growth IT resources Requires at least one dedicated senior IT specialist. Managing a typical system for a 100 person company takes 85% of a senior technician s time. The bigger the company, the more (expensive) senior technicians it needs to manage its No dedicated IT resources required. User maintenance can be performed by nontechnical personnel. All system management is performed by the service provider Continued on page 8... Guide Managed 7

8 In-house implementation Typical managed solution Deployment Average 30 days to deploy an inhouse solution Can be up and running in minutes Reliability/Maintenance Lack of redundancy and bandwidth, poor administration, delay in upgrades any of these can cause security and performance issues. Result: business delays and loss of productivity Updates performed in real time. Service provider systems are fully redundant and backed up routinely Security Combating viruses, and updating servers, is a costly and largely manual process that is prone to delay and error. This spells increased vulnerability Security and mobility services are automatic and real-time, with advanced features available at low incremental cost Productivity tools Pay for new software. Spend time installing it. Anti-spam, and intelligent filtering and archiving, are often available on-demand, making it cheap and easy to achieve significant productivity gains Support A small support team means that you may have to wait until the next business day to fix issues that have arisen outside of business hours Support is usually available 24/7 Guide Managed 8

9 Nonetheless, SMBs still need to ask some critical questions before taking the decision to go managed. For example, how many customers does the provider currently support, and how has this changed over the past year? What volume do they support? How much storage is included per account, and how much does extra storage cost per gigabyte? What security services are offered as part of a basic managed account? What mobile platforms are supported (BlackBerry? Apple iphone? Good Technology?) As far as proof goes, there is none better than looking around you to see what your peers are doing. Osterman Research, cited in this whitepaper summary, has said that the proportion of users served by managed (Cloud) delivery has almost doubled from 2012 to There are now over 170 million worldwide users of just one of the many -based managed solutions (Microsoft Exchange) alone. is sending SMBs a message. Don t file it in the trash. For more information on managed IT services including you can contact us on or at sales@flint-it.com Guide Managed 9

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