How Executives Can Evolve their Business with Cloud Managed Services

Page I | How Executives Can Evolve their Business with Cloud Managed Services | Copyright @ 2022 Mastek
How Executives Can
Evolve their Business with
Cloud Managed Services

Page II | How Executives Can Evolve their Business with Cloud Managed Services | Copyright @ 2022 Mastek
Business Value is a Priority for Managed Services �� 01
The Role of Managed Services Has Changed �� 01
Four Critical Limitations of Conventional Managed Services �� 02
How to Design Managed Services for Strategic Goals�� 03
MGroup Services Uses Cloud Managed Services to Measure
Business Value .................................................... �� 05
Conclusion: Meet Business Challenges with Cloud Managed
Services.................................................................. �� 06
Table of contents

| How Executives Can Evolve their Business with Cloud Managed Services | Copyright @ 2022 Mastek
Business Value is a Priority for Managed Services
Procuring managed services has traditionally been defined by an emphasis on finding a Managed Service Provider
(MSP) with capacity and capability. But then you struggle to find skilled IT professionals, lead in product
innovation, secure investment and drive down costs.
The question, then, is this: can you improve strategic initiatives with a shift to business value? This is critical in
a volatile economic environment that has moved managed services from a business-as-usual (BAU) solution to
a strategic effort that must support enterprise results.
In a 2020 survey, Forrester and ServiceNow found that service decision makers were looking to increase their
investments in managed service to get a better understanding of their IT infrastructure and assets (40%),
increase productivity (40%) and control costs (39%).
In this white paper, we will explore:
h How the role of managed services has changed
h The four critical limitations of conventional managed services
h Why you should work with MSPs for strategic goals
h What an ideal managed services solution looks like
The bottom line is that that the success of your business depends on identifying and leveraging MSPs that can
deliver business value aligned to your organisational goals.
The Role of Managed Services Has Changed
In the past, MSPs would run IT services and infrastructure for a business based on a
break-fix model, where companies would contract an outside team to identify
problems and resolve them as they happened. This outsourced model
of managed services was focused on reactive fixes, technical
issues and guess work. Now, to deliver value, companies
need to change their services model to a proactive
approach, where the focus is on measurable
business outcomes.
Yet, the rise of managed services in the 1990s
was deeply rooted in a reactive approach based
on remote monitoring and task completion. The
result for customers was long downtimes and a
significant impact on worker productivity, which put
revenue at risk.
In the 2010s, the advent of cloud led to increasingly
complex services built on dynamic environments and
waves of technology disruption were directly tied to the
cloud. Managed services began to focus on how businesses
could evolve their applications to meet both cloud demands
and business strategies.
Now, enterprises are struggling to create digital roadmaps that
mitigate the economic downturn as they face the twin challenges
of skills shortages and highly distributed applications.

Organisations must evaluate how managed services can add strategic value to their
business.
Steve Hall, Partner and President of Information Services Group (ISG) said, “With
inflation and the possibility of a recession looming, we think we’re going to have
more enterprises turning to outsourcing and managed services to lower their delivery
costs.”
Because value is now measured by business results, companies need to use managed services to support strategic
plans and protect revenue growth.
Four Critical Limitations of Conventional Managed Services
h Conventional managed services limitation #1: Inadequate links between business and
IT
Traditional managed services focus on reactive solutions that don’t link the IT environment with end user
experience and business outcomes. Teams end up with a narrow view of the service and don’t always
understand the impact on user experience, which results in poor customer satisfaction.
h Conventional Managed Services limitation #2: Limited performance measurements
Companies must be realistic about what can be achieved with traditional Service Level Agreements (SLAs)
that don’t include business outcomes. SLAs have restricted the delivery of value by preserving a focus on
behaviours and resources. For example, an incident occurs and is fixed in 15 minutes, which achieves the
SLA. It happens again each Friday and every time the SLA is green. But the client experiences massive user
disruption on a regular basis.
h Conventional Managed Services limitation #3: Poor allocation of in-house talent
The problem with conventional managed services is that often activities are manually executed with
limited automation because of lack of investment and specialist skills. This impacts the availability of skills
required for strategic initiatives that are critical to business success.
h Conventional Managed Services limitation #4: Lack of focus on digital transformation
Because traditional pricing focuses on technology and upfront investment, it prioritises short-term gains
over long-term service stability, consistency with talent, flexibility and innovation. As such, there is a lack
of focus on continuous improvement, team performance, training opportunities and new technologies for
long-term wins.

How to Design Managed Services for Strategic Goals
One of the most valuable benefits of having access to cloud managed services is that they allow companies to
provide a continuous focus on value so that they can be more responsive to market conditions. It’s no surprise,
then, Gartner’s 2022 ‘cloud shift’ research found that 65.9% of spending on application software will be directed
toward cloud technologies in 2025, up from 57.7% in 2022.
The continuous evolution available with cloud managed services can be a game-changing
alternative to the traditional ways of supporting and maintaining digital services.
Many companies don’t have access to the full potential of cloud because of concerns about the complexity
of SaaS environments, skills shortages and the risk of disrupting operations with the transfer to a new service
provider. The answer is to choose service providers that take on the responsibility for driving an ongoing shift
towards new capabilities in a rapidly changing market.
Figure 1 compares the two traditional classes of managed services with a cloud based approach that offers
constant validation of business value, as discussed in the following sections.
Project Stabilise Operate
Time
Business
Value
Go-Live
Support
Maintain
Evolve
Value Improvement
Measure drive business value.
Focus on business outcomes.
Maintain alignment between
systems and business demands
Value Erosion
Maintaining the core platform.
Focus on SLAs / technology KPIs.
Value will eventually decline as
system loses business alignment.
Value Destruction
Reactive, fix-on-fail. Focus on cost
reduction. Poor end user
experience. Without positive
intervention, this is the default
position.
The services must maintain alignment with both the original Cloud adoption
business case, and ongoing changes in the business landscape.
Without a conscious decision to drive continued evolution alignment, the
default outcome may be an ongoing reduction in business value.
Figure 1: Comparing the three different models of managed services
The cloud managed services model enables businesses to increase their agility and navigate the challenges of
disruptive markets. Michael Warrilow, Research Vice President at Gartner insists on the need to keep up with
the pace of change:
Organisations aren’t investing in the higher value skills and capabilities needed to
go to the next level, particularly in areas such as artificial intelligence, machine
learning and DevOps.

Here are a few of the ways that leaders can take advantage of cloud managed services to maintain alignment
between business demands and systems:
h Evaluate updates for business value
An important step towards business outcomes is to enable a constant validation of business value in
a multi-cloud environment. Work closely with an MSP that can evaluate the impact of regular cloud
application updates with automated regression testing and analysis of changes in functionality. This
enables them to produce recommendations on the potential impact to business processes and to identify
new opportunities for business value.
This maintains the alignment of your services with both the original cloud adoption business case and
ongoing changes in the organisational landscape.
h Invest in service automation
Most businesses are unlikely to have the technical skills to integrate automation capabilities that can work
across hybrid and multi-cloud environments, but these are essential to process performance. For example,
Remote Monitoring and Management (RMM) is able to track your critical business processes such as alerts
and monitoring to automatically detect issues.
Working with a skilled MSP that has access to a strong partner network helps you to align automation with
your business goals, improve outcomes and reduce the need for skilled in-house resources.
h Enable self-service and data democratisation
It’s increasingly important to start with the improvement areas that you need to focus on and then
implement measurable changes. For example, if you want to reduce cycle time, increase user adoption,
check compliance or monitor low performers, analytics dashboards can support visibility into actionable
data.
Comprehensive analytics ensure the delivery of business value by capturing, storing and leveraging data to
identify future opportunities to improve your business.
h Prioritise change management
As part of your implementation, you need to manage change with respect to upscaling of labour,
compliance and business goals to ensure that the target operating model aligns to and delivers on the
business requirements. This is an ongoing need, not a one-off exercise, as the cloud environment regularly
changes and businesses must keep on top of these in order to extract the most value.
h Improve manual processes
It’s important to provide end-to-end business process improvement. Successful process engineering
depends on a closer working relationship with end users so that you can generate new value for them by
refining manual processes. For example, if they have to go through 10 steps to complete a process, look at
how it could be made more efficient whilst providing the same outcome.
The shift towards business outcomes is more effective when processes are efficient and resources can
deliver results more quickly or work on activities that have greater value.

h Support digital transformation
Running your applications in the cloud with an innovation-led MSP helps you to accelerate plans to build
new digital products, reduce costs in IT maintenance, and deliver more value for customers. With
a particular focus on knowledge transfer, you can make sure that your internal team develops their
technical, functional and administrative knowledge for service continuity and improvements.
Evolve Your Managed Services for Business Outcomes
Businesses can evolve their use of managed services to support business requirements by regularly assessing
their internal knowledge and capabilities, operating model, applications and emerging technologies.
“While MSPs come at a cost to companies – often through subscriptions – demand is
accelerating because businesses can rely on them as a turnkey option to implement
automation technologies,” says Jason Warrelmann, VP of Global Services and Process
Industries at UiPath.
Here are some of the solution features that you should consider when
selecting an MSP:
h Clear strategy and roadmap which then moves to stabilisation and
value improvement
h The ability to meet you where you are whilst still taking a
forward-looking approach
h Standard models for delivery, service transition and
performance improvement across multi-cloud environments
h Aligns services to business outcomes using analytics
platforms
h Integrates automation capabilities in multi-cloud cloud
environments
h Strategic vendor partnerships that use processes to
add business value and prioritise user experience
h Flexible commercial models that facilitate your
business objectives
MGroup Services Uses Cloud Managed
Services to Measure Business Value
MGroup Services (MGS) delivers engineering, infrastructure transport and telecoms services. Their mission is
to improve how essential services are delivered.
The organisation implemented Oracle Cloud Managed Services to create a single view of enterprise information
and remove data redundancy from heavy customisation.
Using value based analytics to plan and evolve their services, MGS has:

h Reduced purchasing cycle time by 50%
h Reduced technical debt from customisation by 80%
h Accelerated Mergers and Acquistions processes by 200%
“Mastek’s value-based analytics meant that they prioritised measurement for
continuous improvement so that we can now align our business vision with identified
KPIs, normalised benchmarks and quarterly reviews. This is why we have achieved
solid business outcomes such as optimised catalogue spend and reduced technical
debt,” said Martin Beesley, CFO at MGS.
Conclusion: Meet Business Challenges with Cloud Managed
Services
There’s no mystery as to why companies are moving to cloud managed services to achieve improved business
value. With no end to the economic challenges facing businesses, the need to align services to outcomes has
never been more urgent. Beyond this, however, companies are realising that MSPs can give them access to a
highly skilled workforce that can drive their digital transformation forward.
Cloud managed services have become valued, not for being a low cost way of shifting technical effort to an
outsourced model, but rather as a strategic initiative to remove skills constraints and drive user experience,
accountability and continuous service improvement.
Mastek is well positioned to understand how we can align our services to your business requirements. Please get
in touch to find out how we can transform your managed services.

About Mastek
Mastek (NSE: MASTEK; BSE: 523704), is a Turnkey Trusted Digital Engineering Cloud Transformation Partner
that delivers Innovative Solutions and Business Outcomes for clients in Healthcare Life Sciences, Retail,
Manufacturing, Financial Services, Government/Public Sector, etc. We enable customer success and decomplex
digital by partnering with enterprises to unlock the power of data, modernize applications to the cloud, and
accelerate digital advantage for all stakeholders. We are the only Oracle Cloud implementation and consultancy
partner to have successfully moved 1300+ clients to cloud. Customers Trust Mastek to deliver Business Value
with Velocity and we operate in 40+ countries including the UK, Americas, Europe, Middle East APAC with
~6000 employees. MST Solutions, a Mastek company, is a Summit level Salesforce consulting partner trusted by
several Fortune 1000 enterprise clients. For more details, please visit our website www.mastek.com
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