SA companies turn to outsourcing to drive more value from ICT infrastructure

South African enterprises, coming under increasing pressure to do more with their ICT infrastructure while spending less money on technology, are increasingly turning towards external service providers from help.

That’s according to Dione le Roux, Infrastructure Services Manager at African Legend (AL) Indigo. He says that managing ICT infrastructure is turning into a major headache for many CIOs because of a shortage of ICT skills as well as the squeeze that the economic downturn is putting on their operational and capital expenditure budgets.

“What’s more, reduced budgets for ICT infrastructure come at a time when most companies are struggling with a range of infrastructure-related challenges because of the growing complexity of their heterogeneous environments and an increasing regularity burden, says Le Roux. The amount of servers, storage devices and applications continues to spiral, yet the skills and resources to bring it all under control are in short supply.

 "During these difficult economic times, companies around the world need to drive more value from their ICT infrastructure without compromising on business service levels," he adds.

"Affordable and reliable ICT infrastructure is central to any enterprise’s competitiveness, yet infrastructure management has become a headache for most organisations."

Le Roux notes that the challenges of infrastructure management are not limited to South Africa, but faced by enterprises across the world. Software vendor, Symantec, found in a study (entitled ‘State of the Data Centre 2008′) that 75% of the data centres it surveyed around the world were seeing user expectations rise while 34% reported that reducing costs was a strategic priority for the future.

"This is the central paradox that most companies face: they must do more with their technology but spend less on their ICT infrastructure. As a result, data centres are aggressively adopting tools such as server and storage virtualisation and tools that allow them to automate common data centre tasks to drive efficiencies across their infrastructures," Le Roux says.

Outsourcing infrastructure management to a service provider that can provide turnkey solutions that span all of the typical enterprise’s basic ICT infrastructure needs is an increasingly popular approach to keeping infrastructure costs down without compromising on service levels.

"Service providers that focus on the infrastructure space have the skills and economies of scale to help their customers to simplify management of their IT environments, drive down their operating costs and increase their return on investment;" says Le Roux. "They have the expertise to help clients to not only keep the lights on, but to also start optimising and improving their ICT infrastructures so that they can achieve more on their limited budgets."

“Companies increasingly want to partner with service providers that can offer them a single point of contact for all their infrastructure needs, he adds. This provides them with a single point of accountability and simplifies the management of their infrastructures.”