Intelligent CIO Africa Issue 16 | Page 54

FEATURE: IT OUTSOURCING in the application economy where consistent, quality, customer experiences is the name of the game with one of the key goals being the acquisition of a single view of customers’ transactions. Businesses failing to deliver the quality and consistency of experience expected by customers today are doomed to failure and they will unquestionably not survive. Customers today do not give second chances. Customers’ service perceptions are a direct reflection on the quality of a company’s IT provision and consumers are unforgiving if exposed to erratic service experiences. To summarise, adoption of an ITMaaS model translates into outsourcing the day- to-day administrative and operational tasks associated with the service management environment giving businesses the THE ABILITY TO GAIN VISIBILITY INTO AN INTERNAL IT STRUCTURE AND DELIVER THE PERFORMANCE DATA IS A CRITICAL COMPONENT WITHIN THE MANAGEMENT PROCESS. flexibility to adapt quickly to changing situations and technologies. Above all, this solution empowers companies with the ability to provide incomparable service delivery to their customers which is the holy grail of all businesses today. So the bottom line is: re-imagine your IT and how you are managing it. n 54 INTELLIGENTCIO ////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// As an increasing number of organisations become more ambitious with their cloud migration strategies, Sonja Weber, Lead Delivery Solution Manager at T-Systems South Africa, says that ICT outsourcing is certainly not dead, although technology players are being forced to add value in new ways. The evolving role of the ICT outsourcer W hile hyperscale cloud OEMs provide many of the essential infrastructure and services that an organisation needs, local technology partners play a crucial role in guiding clients on everything from governance, compliance, security and the management of costs. The accessibility of public cloud environments certainly creates phenomenal opportunities for digital transformation, but (if migration is not managed incorrectly) can also open up a number of risks and significantly inflate costs. Consider for example dozens of different departments or business areas procuring licenses, services and capacity from cloud platforms, creating new company profiles and using various credit cards to buy these services. It’s an administrative nightmare for CIOs as they scramble to control the various cloud services that a business has purchased to understand potential security vulnerabilities and get a grip on just how much is being spent. The problem often described as ‘shadow IT’ has become a huge, ugly monster in the cloud era. ‘Wild West’ scenario In the worst cases, this fragmentation of a firm’s cloud services creates a wide range of problems, including: • • • • • Information security risks Inflated costs Governance concerns and audit failures Regulatory and compliance breaches Loss of control and co-ordination of digitisation strategy • Business downtime and risks due to lack of support and business continuity plans • Reputational damage, if services are insecure or unavailable To help deal with this issue of reckless, ungoverned and fragmented cloud subscriptions, the modern ICT outsourcer must evolve its role. It’s no longer a case www.intelligentcio.com