3 Top IT Outsourcing Providers For Managed Services

IT infrastructure outsourcing is a global trend which presents many advantages for business owners. By choosing IT outsourcing providers with proper certifications, the financial burden of an expensive IT infrastructure can be avoided. IT outsourcing costs are balanced by the reduction of infrastructure but also maintenance. Additionally, managed IT services also provide greater peace of mind with their reliance on cloud backups. Three IT companies are offering their IT services in the Caribbean region: Digicel, CBS and LIME.

Trends in Outsourcing IT Services

IT companies are positioned to attack one of sector with the fastest growth in information technology — cloud computing via outsourced IT managed services.

When compared with IT outsourcing costs, revenues earned from cloud services last year are estimated at US$41 billion, and should grow to US$214 billion by 2020.

According to Michael HoShue (consultant at Ignition Technology Group, a partner of Flow under the IT infrastructure outsourcing business banner Columbus Business Solutions) demand for cloud services and IT companies providing IT solutions offshore grew by 68% in a year.

Within companies themselves, chief information officers (CIOs) are now ranking IT infrastructure outsourcing to the cloud as their second priority, from 16th in 2009.

Benefits of IT Managed Services

Any business can potentially benefit significantly from embracing the outsourcing of IT support and technology, explaining the incredible growth witnessed in the global demand on IT outsourcing providers.

Offshore IT services enable businesses to prevent expensive investment in IT infrastructure, such as servers, and software licenses and instead use IT managed services outsourced to information technology companies offshore. This allows them to forgo the purchase of expensive computing equipment and software.

Estimations on the potential savings from using managed services offered by an outsourced IT infrastructure range between 30 and 50 per cent for the customers.

Such innovation in IT services can bring business the edge of a cost-effective, offshore IT services on a pay as you go basis. Even the smallest companies can encounter great benefits from this type of IT support.

Beyond financial competitiveness, outsourcing IT services bring other non-negligible advantages such as automatic cloud backups.

CBS Niall Sheehy (regional IT business solutions vice-president), highlights the importance of IT data backups:

“40% of businesses that lose data in the event of a natural disaster fail to recommence operations.”

Together with diminishing capital expenses and decreasing IT maintenance, outsourced IT services allow a company to concentrate on other IT managed serviced and develop better strategies.

“Companies spend 70 per cent of the time maintaining legacy systems. Cloud services could release as much of that time to allow IT managers to focus of strategic direction.” (HoShue)

3 Top IT Outsourcing Providers Offshore in the Caribbean

Digicel Business now offers cloud backup, IT managed hosting and co-location to its corporate customers. It also plans to bring other IT and outsourcing services in the future including emails, hosted BlackBerry servers, virtual servers and cloud telecommunications.

In the same category of IT outsourcing providers, its competitor LIME already offers other IT services, such as IT managed network services, hosted email and exchange, disaster recovery, firewall monitoring, IT management and outsourced email marketing.

• Digicel made Jamaica its hub for cloud services. Digicel set down an investment of US$600 million in its information and telecommunication facility created in 2009. The ensuing IT services are available for outsourcing across the entire region and have received a Tier III Design Certification from The Uptime Institute. This certification of Tier III validates the redundancy behind the backups of the IT systems.
• CBS has set up its IT managed services in Curaçao and their facility also meets the Tier III classification. The country was chosen for its clement weather. Although Curacao is offshore in the Caribbean, it is hurricane-free which also explains why tourism in Curacao is booming. This facility under the Flow IT company header will now concentrate on attaining certifications (Tier 3, SAS 70 and ISO 27001) to retain its competitve edge.
• LIME is an IT outsourcing provider with IT facilities located across several continents and regions including the Caribbean, North America, South America and Central America. These facilities are Tier 2, 3 and 4.