The Challenge

The requirement for every business to be a digital business has put some strain on the typical IT team.  In addition to keeping things running, IT has to address needs for new services, add higher availability, and increase security all while reducing costs.  At the same time, technology is changing more rapidly than ever making the decisions a moving target.  Consider the rise of cloud in the modern IT environment.  Terms like public, private, and hybrid are becoming commonplace.  What is less commonplace is an understanding of when and why they make sense, a validation that these offerings will really save money or improve productivity, and the capabilities to design and implement a solution given the vast array of possibilities.  If a decision is made to pursue one of these options, vendor evaluation and selection can be another time-consuming process for a staff already tasked with multiple priorities.

Then there is the rise of anything-as-a-service.  From Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS) to Unified Communications-as-a-Service (UCaaS) to Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS) there are so many new offerings claiming to reduce costs, improve productivity, and enhance availability all at the same time.  An organization needs to ask  "Do any of these offerings make sense for the business?"  "Do they really save money?"  "Are they secure?"  "Do we lose control of our data?"  "Do we lose flexibility?"  "Who are the leading providers?"  "What is the their track record?"  "Are others using it successfully?" to name a few.  Formulating and evaluating these questions and the answers can be a lengthy process.  Determining how to proceed and eventually implement one of these solutions takes even more time.

With a moving target and a litany of new offerings, it's no wonder IT projects in organizations may be over-budget and over the projected timeline.  Even worse is the perception that the projects fail to deliver the results expected.  This leaves the IT team in a tough spot explaining the cost overruns and dealing with a user base that may be underwhelmed by the deployment.  IT becomes the bad guy for disrupting the business instead of increasing productivity and reducing costs.

Assuming the project finishes on-time and on-budget, there is the matter of supporting the new environment.  Often the evaluation includes the product element but ensuring properly skilled team members and a process to support the new deployment can get lost in the shuffle of vendor evaluation and deployment.  This can result in features slowly being removed due to lack of support or even cause the project to be abandoned altogether and become the dreaded "shelfware".

We Can Help

We understand the challenges of managing an always-on, always-available environment with evolving requirements.  We can sympathize with feeling like you can't take a day off or put the phone down for 10 minutes while you wait for the next problem to pop up.  Or maybe you spend your free time wondering if you will have to deal with a security issue and what impact it will have.  Maybe you are asking questions like "Will my DR plan work?"  or "Do I even have a DR plan?".  Perhaps the concern is about whether or not you are delivering value to the business in general.  Modern IT management can be stressful to say the least.

At TTL, we are focused on reducing the stress associated with managing the IT infrastructure.  From strategy discussions to requirements gathering to vendor evaluation and selection to implementation, we give you a plan to build the infrastructure and give you back time to focus on addressing the needs of the business.  We do this in three main ways:

Contact us today so we can help reduce the stress associated with the IT infrastructure.