Managed Services versus outsourcing: What’s the difference?
Imagine you’re in charge of technology operations for a progressive business firm. Your in-house IT department is stretched too thin providing support across multiple time zones. Application monitoring blind spots, infrastructure failure, or other disruptions can cause support costs to spike unexpectedly. Whenever your lone resident expert on a specific technology calls in sick, you find yourself praying nervously that nothing goes wrong. These and other vulnerabilities might have convinced you that it’s time to seek help outside your organization. “We need operations outsourcing,” you might say to yourself, and search for companies that advertise themselves as cost-appropriate technology outsourcing service providers. However, your time might actually be better spent searching for a managed service provider providing “Everything as a Service” (XaaS) for technology. Wait, what?
Outsourcing by another name? Most people’s first impulse is to assume that “managed services” is just a fancy name for technology outsourcing, especially since the latter can bring to mind the worst-case scenario: semi-trained remote workers that you can barely understand. Is managed services essentially the same, just dressed up differently? Thankfully, the answer is no. While it’s true that both managed services and outsourcing involve hiring an external organization, they involve vastly different scopes of work. Outsourcing firms provide discrete services that are responsible for narrowly defined business processes. You might want to outsource your tier-1 helpdesk, for example, or maybe you need someone