Sleep at night with managed services

It is tough for the IT leader of medium sized companies to do everything they need to accomplish given the rapidly changing world and the rapidly changing business needs.   There is a solution.   It is about having a strategy, one that has been created thoughtfully to do target outsourcing of functions by experts in each area that is critical to the business.   Today, there is a great deal of hype around Cloud.   This can satisfy some of the needs, but in reality, there ais a wide range of services that an IT leader needs to deliver.   In the medium sized company, he/she is unlikely to be able to hire the staff to deliver on all of the needs.   

Here is my list of services to outsource for a medium sized IT leader

• Server management as a service - Clouds are great for what they do, but all organizations will have infrastructure that is not outsourced.   
• Network management as a service - Same comment as servers.   The best manage service vendors are specialized.   Look for a good network managed service vendor that is responsible for changes, monitoring, diagnosing, and resolving issues.  Do not accept one that does not monitor and respond.
• End-to-end application monitoring as a service.   End-to-end means you need visibility to the user experience thorugh all layers of the architecture that can affect this experience.   Buy into allowing this outsourced service to declare that events have occurred and orchestrate response across other managed service providers.
• ERP Managed Service or SaaS service - This is very popular for a reason.
• Ecommerce Platform managed service or SaaS - If it is not part of the ERP managed service, it needs to be integrated not only with data but also for incident management and change management.
• eCatalog data integration management as a service - this is a specialty of the Distribution industry.   I'd love to speak with you about this.
• Security management as a service (logs, penetration and vulnerability testing) I would include Phishing training management as a service in this group.
• Disaster Recovery as a Service has a place that can be well tuned for a low-cost public cloud implementation.   
• Email as a service.   This should be on the top of the list.   As you know, it happens to be the most business critical application that no one thinks of until there is a problem.   If it is not outsourced, do it the first day on your new job.