Managed Services – A stepping stone to digital transformation?

What role do Managed Services play today?

Managed Services are indispensable in times like these, where digital transformation is accelerating in the economy and public sector and companies are suffering staff shortages. This is even more the case when we speak of professional end-to-end support.

What does Bechtle’s Managed Services offering include?

We take on the end-to-end operations of IT architectures, workstations, platforms, security and the cloud, thus laying a sound foundation for the company’s future transformation.

Our customers are looking for a Managed Services partner who can offer the expertise for the technologies implemented while understanding how services can be used for a successful transformation and enable digital business models.

In which areas are customers looking for a Managed Services partner?

This varies a lot and is often a result of staff shortages or increasing complexity. IT security is one of the triggers for Managed Services. Managing security is becoming increasingly complex, and if IT security is not managed correctly, it can lead to an inherent risk for every company of being brought to a grinding halt by a security incident. With our Managed Security Services, we can mitigate precisely this risk.

What other tasks are you faced with?

Digital transformation and the new alignment of business models are an incentive to pay attention to Managed Services. Often, customers don’t know how to go about this, which for us means providing our customers with the greatest possible flexibility and range of opportunities, technologies, cloud providers, etc..

Can you give us an example of how you approach this?

It’s very individual. But to sum things up, the Plan – Build – Run waterfall model has transformed into the agile Innovate – Design – Transform. Even in the early stages, we set great store by planning our Managed Services in accordance with the Future Mode of Operation rather than the Current Mode of Operation.

What does the future hold in store for Managed Services?

Automation, without a doubt. Not only for security reasons, but also to keep service quality at a high level, avoid errors and to be able to better scale and master complexities. And last but not least, to meet the expectations of digitalisation in terms of self-service and DevSecOps.

So automation in every nook and cranny?

Not necessarily. The effort required has to balance out with the actual business benefits.

Which means?

Automation has to be developed and maintained. In DevSecOps collaboration models with a high degree of automation, programmers require operation expertise while administrators on the other hand require programming skills. These are still quite new professions and it is, therefore, quite challenging to combine these two qualities into one position

What does automation for Managed Services mean concretely?

It’s impossible to give a straightforward answer to that question, as automation isn’t just automation. As with digitalisation in general, this is not just about automatically mapping existing processes, but about considering how the potential of automation can be leveraged to do things differently.

In the future, however, Managed Services will be automatically deployed by technology and supported by people wherever the tech can’t make headway. And this is a true paradigm shift.

That sounds like another victory for standardisation.

We are convinced that the combination of individual and standardised Managed Services is the way forward. When it comes to designing Managed Services, our system houses are excellent at responding to customers’ individual needs. They are supported by centrally deployed, standardised and scalable services that can be extended and adapted by the system house on-site to offer customers the optimum business value.

• Portfolio: Bechtle Managed Services – less administration, more business
• Press Release: Bechtle offers hyperscaler clouds as a managed service