The Business Benefits of IT as a Service

What are the benefits of IT as a Service? Some of the benefits for the user and/or the business are vast actually. One benefit would be predictable outcomes and well-structured service levels so that the business user of the IT service could understand how the service is best utilized, leveraged and “consumed.” With well-defined service levels for items such as availability, performance and continual service improvements over time, the user’s expectations can be properly set for the optimal use of the IT service. In this model, key performance indicators and advanced analytics can be applied to optimize the cost/benefit of the services for the business. Feedback loops, tracking and monitoring of the service metrics with “big data” type analysis are now leveraged to tune, optimize, even create new services required by the business.

The other real benefit would be the fact that the investment profile tends to change when you’re consuming things as a service. Instead of spending time building the infrastructure and manage the platforms yourself, whether that be capital investment in equipment facilities or capital investment in a certain types of applications, what one can now do is subscribe to the IT service. For instance, one can now easily buy infrastructure management or applications services in more of an operating expense manner.

There’s also an investment by the service provider, which can act as a major CAPEX balance sheet financial benefit to the buyers of the service. Last, but not least, the notion of consuming a service also makes your overall operating parameters much less complex. Clearly that service needs to be consistent, accessible and supportable, but how that’s service is built, how it’s internally managed, how it’s enhanced, how it’s reconfigured and customized…all those things, all that complexity, can now be bestowed upon a IT service provider, such as Bell Techlogix, versus having to worry about that complexity inside of the internal IT operation.