When you go to your telecoms provider what do you get? Lines, servers and appliances or do you get end to end services? As we deliver more and more functionality to our ever more demanding end users the work of the IT department involves increasing complexity and management.

A lot of this is down to the expectations of the users who when they are at home can plug their phone or camera into their PC and get instant recognition and functionality. This has created an ever more demanding internal customer for the IT team.

This is starting to polarise the services in the market into enterprise and user centric services:

• Enterprise centric services are what we would traditionally buy from our ICT supplier; hosting, leased lines, perimeter security etc.
  
• User centric services are becoming more readily available as businesses want to buy services on a more flexible basis.

Buying services for the user, like managed email or hosted telephony can have a lot of advantages for your business as it delivers flexibility, low cost entry (no hardware or integration costs) and no need for backup patching or upgrades.

Of course introducing these types of services into your business doesn't mean you won't need to buy infrastructure services in the future, you will still need a network and a secure data centre but you will be able to free up time for some of those more strategic questions rather than "why isn't my mail working?". For further information please see our latest whitepaper "Turning IT into a strategic driver"

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