What Are Hybrid IT Services?

With the ongoing labor shortages and economic hardships, businesses must learn how to optimize their third-party partners and internal staff to reach sustainability. One of the best approaches in this regard is allocating high-value tasks to the in-house staff while outsourcing general, repeatable, and scalable tasks to third-party vendors or individuals. 

In the context of IT, this approach is referred to as hybrid IT services. 

By reviewing the value of their IT operations, companies can analyze each of the functions and see how they stack up relative to efficiency, quality, and cost savings. Thus, they can refocus their valuable IT resources to drive business and eventually, boost the bottom line. 

In simple terms, the foundation of a hybrid IT services model can be separated into two layers. The first one is applications and data, which can stay in-house, while the second is the infrastructure that is well-suited for outsourcing. 

In this post, we’ll take a look at how these two work together, along with how they can help you sustain business growth and unlock an extra dose of value.

To Outsource Or Not To Outsource?

In order to determine the business value of your information technology assets, you need to carefully analyze the intangible and tangible costs of internal and external sourcing of different IT operations. By fine-tuning the balance between the two, you’ll have an easier time optimizing your investment and increasing your revenue.

For instance, your analysis may reveal that your main system administrator is spending excessive time managing your IT infrastructure rather than focusing on business-critical tasks. This unfortunately means that their value isn’t fully justified and you could benefit from allowing a third party to handle the infrastructure.

At the same time, LOB (line-of-business) applications that depend on a highly specialized and business-specific set of skills should be handled by the in-house team with the same rationale applied to management. 

But on the other hand, since designing and maintaining IT infrastructures is a standardized and multi-disciplined affair, outsourcing is a logical step if it alleviates the pressure from the internal team. 

Why You Should Keep Application Management In-house

Most, if not all organizations rely on various applications to accomplish their business goals. These LOB tools are taking center stage in everything from inventory, project and document management to accounting and so on. 

The problem here is that operating and supporting these applications will be unique to each company, and it’s not uncommon for internal staff to already have a long list of highly specific processes in place. Hence, outsourcing would incur too many issues and most likely necessitate extended training and micromanagement from the executive level. 

Since your in-house staff already has deep familiarity with company processes and knows how to properly support existing LOB apps, there’s no reason to fix what ain’t broken. Here’s why it’s valuable to keep this aspect of your IT infrastructure within the confines of your offices:

• Boost productivity: supporting critical applications requires effective communication between business users and the IT department. By insourcing, staff members can collaborate in real time, leading to more efficiency and high productivity. 
• Implement automation: by investing in the skills of internal staff, they can achieve a new level of fluidity with systems in your organization. Furthermore, due to their hands-on experience, they’ll have an easy time recognizing which functions should be customized and automated to achieve a higher level of efficiency. 
• More control over data: by keeping LOB operations in-house, you’ll have more control over data and easier access to business intelligence. This ultimately helps gain a competitive advantage and avoid issues with regulatory compliance and data confidentiality.

Why You Should Outsource Infrastructure Management

Third-party infrastructure management is a key aspect of hybrid IT services. Look at it this way - by ensuring your IT infrastructure is properly designed and maintained, your business can reach operational maturity.

Yet, it’s worth noting that IT infrastructures are growing more complex with each passing day. At the time of writing, on a basic level, an average IT infrastructure can include the following components:

• Core computing - PCs, laptops, servers, mobile devices
• Network - hardware switching devices, firewalls, wireless access
• Secure cloud access - SaaS, IaaS solutions
• Advanced software - data replication, virtual machines
• Cybersecurity

Maintaining and managing these components in a standardized fashion is not easy as it requires specialized skill sets and a plethora of technical disciplines. Individuals working in these positions need ongoing training and a high number of manufacturer certifications. With new changes in IT technology occurring each day, finding the right people to fill these roles internally will simply be too challenging. On top of that, investing in certifications, training, and recruitment will cost your organization a significant amount of money.. 

In this case, it simply makes more fiscal sense to take on a hybrid IT services approach and let a managed service partner take over the management of your IT infrastructure.

Here are just a few benefits of outsourcing:

• Internal staff can focus on business-critical tasks: outsourcing the mind-numbing task of managing the IT infrastructure to a third-party provider releases a whole lot of pressure from your internal team who can focus on processes that drive revenue. All the while, a managed service partner will provide you with all the expertise needed to efficiently manage IT systems. 
• Scalability and reliability: with third-party support, you can easily expand or scale down the infrastructure when needed without worrying about resource losses or supporting the team during transformations. 
• Save money: hiring and training new employees in specialized IT skills is costly. Additionally, there’s a shortage of skilled IT specialists, which means filling new roles may take excessive time which you may not be able to afford. So by outsourcing, you can save both time and money.

Support Your Growth The Right Way

Taking everything into account, leveraging the hybrid IT services model is arguably the best way to minimize operational costs, make all IT operations more efficient, and ultimately, drive business performance through the roof.

The best thing is, you’re only outsourcing the tedious part of IT management while still keeping full control over your infrastructure.

Regardless, the choice will depend on the current needs and goals of your organization. However, with the way hybrid IT services help overcome many challenges plaguing almost every business out there, it will be hard to overlook them.