As businesses of all sizes become increasingly dependent on information technology, it’s no secret that it’s becoming harder and harder to attract and retain talented IT professionals to keep all their systems and hardware up and running. Making matters worse, business is becoming more data-driven, software is becoming more ubiquitous, and the Internet of Things is bringing technology into more everyday items, all of which require IT professionals to work to stay ahead of the trends while also tending to the basic blocking and tackling of modern IT services.
All of these factors have led to more than half a million technology job vacancies in the United States, which is expected to rise to 1 million by 2020, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. With numbers like these, it is no wonder why Gartner found in a 2018 study that the IT talent shortage was identified as one of the three biggest business risks.
So what can your organization do to not be one of the 74 percent of businesses dissatisfied with their ability to hang on to IT talent? Many organizations are already turning to one excellent option: working with a managed services provider. Able to provide hosted and remote mainframe managed services in physical and virtual environments, managed services providers help mitigate staffing needs and much more.
One of the biggest benefits of managed services is having access to experienced IT staff at all levels to meet your business’s needs. By their nature, managed services providers offer scalable services and staff that can grow during busy periods or special projects or be at a steady state to maintain operations. Staff also possess the necessary skills, certifications, and tool-specific knowledge your organization needs without having to follow the full HR hiring and recruiting cycle.
Trusting your basic, back-end mainframe responsibilities to a managed services provider will allow your existing IT staff to focus on business objectives that can drive your organization forward. Without having to dedicate time to tasks such as regular patching, updates, and maintenance, your IT staff can focus instead on planning and implementing more strategic projects, better utilizing their knowledge of your environment.
Managed services can also allow your organization to have more predictable operational costs because the selected IT services will be associated with contractual rates that are fixed or aligned to specific usage levels. This can also pay dividends as hardware, software, and other technology changes, which managed services providers invest in on your organization's behalf, helping to prevent spikes in capital costs.
Your business doesn’t need to be in the healthcare or finance industries to be impacted by changes in national and global compliance standards or to be in the crosshairs of cyberthieves. By taking advantage of a managed mainframe provider’s security tools, compliance certifications, and trained IT staff, your organization can benefit without having to constantly train, redesign systems, or update configurations and policies to evolve with security and regulatory demands.
A secondary benefit of utilizing a managed mainframe services provider is their ability to support your organization’s disaster recovery planning. By using a secondary data center located in another geographic area, the managed services provider can help your organization recover key systems and data in the event of a disruption without having to staff and manage the site, further stretching your IT staff’s responsibilities.
Partnering with a managed mainframe services provider can not only help your organization bridge the IT talent gap, but also boost its bottom line and its ability to adjust to changes in security, compliance, and technology requirements. If your organization is ready to learn more, make sure to find a partner with the experience, technical skills, and work ethic that FNTS can deliver.