How Residency Services Boost IT Effectiveness

By Thomas Schmidt

Call it "The Way We Work Now." Never before have enterprises faced more challenges with respect to the management of their IT investments. At the same time, IT leaders find themselves under pressure from multiple constituencies -- including line-of-business executives, suppliers, customers, shareholders and the board -- to deliver at service levels never previously sustained or even attempted.

Perhaps it's no surprise, then, that researcher IDC recently found more and more companies from all types of industries looking into residency services. After all, by turning to experts in areas that have become a management challenge for them, enterprises are able to free up resources for other, more pressing projects; gain knowledge of best practices regarding IT processes; and be assured that key operations will be carried out reliably on a daily basis.

A convergence of IT challenges
Many businesses find themselves faced with tough challenges when it comes to IT management and IT staffing.

• Skill Gaps Businesses are finding it harder and harder to find, train andretain skilled experts in a variety of areas, including security management, data protection, storage, archiving and compliance. After short periods on the job, many individuals in these areas leave for higher pay or seek a career path that takes them into other areas of IT. Managers contribute to the problem by bowing to pressures to focus a greater portion of their  resources on strategic programs rather than ongoing maintenance.
• Complexity The high proliferation of platforms and environments,  together with multiple touch points, is breeding massive complexity. Maintaining today's IT environments takes greater expertise than ever before. The advent of better management tools continues to increase operational efficiency, but these tools require significant expertise as well.
• IT Risk Many areas of IT operations seeing the greatest staffing  challenges are areas of high risk but low strategic value. Few customers will choose one bank over another on the basis of better backup and recovery times. However, the consequences of poor data protection can be disastrous if outages should occur.
• Cost Real costs as well as opportunity costs of hiring, training and retaining skilled IT workers can be quite high. Significant effort is required to train employees on technology and unique operational processes.
• Performance The demand for guaranteed service-level agreements is  rising. Recovery expectations of 100% are not unheard of. Increasingly, there is little tolerance for application inaccessibility.

Together, these factors are driving enterprises to look at alternative approaches to IT staffing. For organizations that aren't ready to consider outsourcing an area completely, residency services provide an alternative.

Overview of residency services
Residency services provide onsite experts to augment an organization's IT staff for routine, critical, and executive-level activities. These services address enterprises' need to realize the full value of their technology investments, and to optimize their resources in support of core business strategies.

Residency services focus on several areas: security management (including endpoint security and antivirus), storage management, data protection, high availability, business continuity, email archiving, IT compliance and application performance management.

Customers can select from three levels of coverage:

• Executive Residency  Principal consultants provide seasoned IT leadership to manage major initiatives, guide operations and corporate strategy, or fill critical gaps at the level of a CTO, CIO, CISO or Head of Operations to minimize operational disruption.
• Expert Residency Experienced consultants and project managers  provide strategic guidance and support for application and other  implementations, bridging technical and business functions.
• Technical Residency Technical consultants provide specialized skills to support day-to-day administration, maintenance, monitoring and troubleshooting of technology environments.

Key benefits
Customers can enjoy a variety of benefits from residency services, depending on their requirements and the nature of their IT environment. They can leverage best practices based on their consultant's previous engagements, as well as industry frameworks like ITIL and CobiT. The residents can also free up customer resources that can then be re-focused on strategic initiatives that drive competitive advantage.

Combining Residency Services and Managed Services
Some enterprises have turned to residency services for solutions to outsource key IT operations entirely. In these cases, vendors can provide residents who handle onsite operations under strict Service Level Agreements (SLAs). These individuals work in combination with managed services experts, who perform 24x7 remote monitoring, remote management, and log analysis of third-party technologies.

According to the IDC Worldwide Services 2006-1010 Forecast, many organizations that use IT outsourcers are trying to hedge risk by multi-sourcing and by focusing on smaller, discrete engagements.

Conclusion
As the risk, cost and complexity associated with managing IT infrastructures continue to grow, today's enterprises often find themselves struggling to realize the full value of their IT investments. As a result, more and more organizations are looking for outside assistance in managing their IT operations. For these organizations, the inclusion of one or more resident consultants as part of their larger IT staff for a specified period of time may well meet their requirements for additional headcount or specific expertise.

Thomas Schmidt writes frequently about information security topics. He has more than 15 years' experience as a writer and editor in high-tech publishing.