What Is Workflow?

A workflow is a series of event-triggered tasks or actions to produce the desired outcome. These actions are performed by people, applications and machines.

IT professionals frequently use multiple IT management applications in workflows, which sometimes involves switching back and forth between applications. They may also move data from one app to another during the process of completing a task. This leads to less-than-desirable results, which in turn leads to lower productivity and costly human errors.

Workflow integration empowers IT pros to operate more efficiently across multiple tools and get the job done faster.

What Is Workflow Integration?

Workflow integration connects one application with another, typically via their application programming interfaces (APIs), to make it easier to accomplish a task.

Once the applications are connected, it’s easier for people and data to move swiftly between applications, bolstering the efficiency of various business processes and saving time for IT professionals.

Workflow integrations are no longer just nice-to-have features. They are critical to the operational efficiency of a business. Multifunctional IT pros do not work with workflows that operate independently of other processes.

For instance, IT pros have found that’s it’s important to have workflow integrations between their Remote Monitoring and Management (RMM), PSA/help desk and IT documentation applications. Kaseya has developed several workflow integrations between VSA, BMS and IT Glue to streamline IT management.

Single Vendor vs. Multiple Vendor Approach

Workflow integrations from a single vendor or multiple vendors, which one is better?

Types of Workflow Integrations

• API Integrations: An API integration is a connection between two or more applications, via their APIs, enabling data flow within the applications without human intervention. API integration is becoming increasingly popular due to the rise of cloud-based applications. It allows seamless data flow, drives productivity and revenue.
• Native Integration: A native integration happens when two applications provide direct integration with APIs. Native integration typically comes for free since it is baked into the total cost of ownership of the application.
• Third-Party Integration: Third-party integration involves the integration of two applications with different APIs into an existing workflow. Developers do not need to create a new application from scratch in this case. They can add an existing application to an ongoing project. For instance, Kaseya has a third-party integration with RapidFire that allows IT professionals to monitor IT infrastructure remotely while enforcing compliance.

The Importance of Workflow Integration

The integration of multiple application workflows hugely benefits businesses across all verticals in the following ways:

Facilitates a positive employee experience

IT pros are often forced to use multiple, poorly integrated IT applications to perform common tasks every day. That’s why it comes as no surprise that a staggering 55% suffer from work exhaustion due to job overload. Workflow integrations make it faster and easier to leverage different application functions by avoiding the need to switch to another user interface (UI).

Builds operational efficiency

Data silos and application switching are kryptonite to operational efficiency. IT pros that can take advantage of tools that have seamless workflow integrations can perform tasks more quickly and accurately. However, non-integrated workflows can result in human errors, which hinder operational efficiency. Integrated workflows also allow information from one application to be readily available in another app. This avoids time wasted looking for information and helps speed up task execution. This, in turn, speeds up critical processes, such as IT incident resolution, which reduces mean time to repair (MTTR) and increases system availability.

Seamless Workflow Integrations With Kaseya

Kaseya has a strong focus on seamless workflows across all of the products in its IT Complete suite of IT management solutions. Workflow integrations across RMM, PSA/Service Desk, IT Documentation, Backup and Disaster Recovery, and more, drive significant improvement in IT operational efficiency and operating cost reduction. This boosts profitability for Managed Service Providers (MSPs) and stretches the IT budget for internal IT teams.

“The way the three tools — VSA, BMS and IT Glue are integrated and work with one another gives our team a great toolset to boost efficiency and save time.”

– Larry Robertson, MERIT Solutions

IT Complete delivers seamless workflow integrations for revenue-generating solutions to drive MSP profitability and technician efficiency. It allows SMBs and IT teams to enjoy better allocation of budgets resources, enabling IT managers to do more with less.

Ultimately, the workflow integration offered by Kaseya eliminates the “space between” — the valuable time IT professionals waste moving between disparate applications.

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What Are Legacy Systems?

Legacy systems are outdated technologies such as applications or hardware that are still in use in companies. Although these systems may still be functional, they are sometimes incompatible with current system versions and become difficult to maintain, patch or integrate with other systems. In an increasingly digital world, legacy applications may not gel well with SaaS environments and end up burdening companies with high operational costs.

What Are Some Types of Legacy Systems?

Systems can be considered outdated for various reasons, including:

1. Unavailability of Updates
   Manufacturers/software vendors, in a bid to keep up with current technology, discontinue selling products or offering updates since the outdated technology becomes expensive to maintain. For example, Windows 7 reached its end of life in January 2020, with free security patches, updates and technical support being terminated.

2. Lack of Expertise and Skills
   As technologies evolve, so do programmers and engineers. As resources learn to adapt to newer languages and technologies, expertise and skills with respect to legacy systems become extinct. For example, companies are struggling to keep mainframe-based Cobol applications running due to resource shortages and plan to move away from it.

3. Inflexibility and Inability to Scale
   Gartner defines a legacy system as ‘Any system that is not sufficiently flexible to meet changing business needs.’ Legacy systems may not integrate well with other more modern systems and technologies such as artificial intelligence tools and big data processing. As a business grows, legacy systems can create bottlenecks, limiting scalability. Such limitations can hinder a company’s ability to have a competitive edge and grow the business.

Why Are Legacy Systems Still Used?

Some companies depend on legacy systems because they provide a business critical function. Extensive customizations the company has made to an application could mean that it’s difficult to find a replacement that meets all of the business’ needs.  Another reason for businesses continuing to run legacy systems could be due to the amount of time, effort and cost it would take to replace them.

What Are the Advantages and Disadvantages of Using Legacy Systems?

Legacy systems have their own advantages and disadvantages. While some legacy systems are easy to use, others can be a burden to the company due to their complexity. Let’s take a look at some of the advantages and disadvantages of legacy systems.

Advantages of legacy systems:

1. Familiarity – Business users might be familiar with legacy technologies and learning to use a new platform will require substantial effort and training.
2. Sunk Costs– The sunk costs of legacy systems are water under the bridge (depreciated capital expenses, most likely), whereas the subscription costs of SaaS applications, for example, represent new operational expense (OpEx).
3. Avoiding disruption – Companies might be reluctant to deal with business continuity issues that may arise due to switching between technologies. 

Disadvantages of legacy systems:

1. Security issues with outdated technologies – If there’s an inability to apply security patches, either because the vendor has stopped providing updates or because applying the update breaks the system, legacy systems can be a security threat. That’s because hackers may be able to exploit newly disclosed vulnerabilities in that legacy software.
2. Incompatibility with newer business systems – As noted above, legacy systems may not integrate well with other more modern systems and technologies that may be critical to business growth.
3. Unscalable workloads – Legacy systems may not be built or configured to handle a sizable increase in workloads, which could hinder a company’s performance.
4. Costly to maintain — Legacy systems, especially those that have undergone extensive customization over the years, can become quite costly to maintain. This drains IT budget away from strategic initiatives that will enhance the business.

What Is Legacy Modernization?

The risk of running legacy systems will sooner or later outweigh the benefits. That’s why modernizing these systems is critical for organizations if they want to move the business forward. Rewriting application code or migrating legacy systems to the latest technologies for better business performance are part and parcel of legacy modernization.

Why Is Legacy Modernization Important?

Legacy systems are often at the core of a company’s IT infrastructure and have the ability to slow down business processes and decrease business efficiency. They also pose a security risk, as discussed, that can attract the attention of cybercriminals. Modernizing legacy systems can help mitigate such risks and allows companies to reach their business goals with reduced costs and improved productivity.

What Are the Benefits of Legacy Modernization?

A few ways companies can benefit from the modernization of legacy software/hardware are:

1. Enhance IT security
   With modernized systems, organizations can improve their IT security posture by getting and applying timely patches and updates. Modern hardware and OSes deliver much better security, as well.

2. Improved system performance
   Newer technologies are designed to offer better stability, scalability and performance than yesterday’s tech. New business applications can take advantage of newer hardware and operating system platforms that provide much higher performance. This improves overall system performance and increases business productivity and efficiency.

3. Frees up IT resources
   By modernizing legacy systems, IT staff are no longer burdened with the time consuming task of maintaining the legacy systems, ultimately freeing up resources for other activities.

4. Optimized operational expenses
   While modern technologies may require considerable initial investment, the maintenance costs they incur should be lower than that of legacy systems.

Legacy System Modernization Approaches

Legacy systems can be modernized in various ways, such as:

• Replacement – Replacing the entire legacy infrastructure with modern system software, hardware and applications.
• Rebuilding – Rewriting the legacy system with modern features and capabilities; this could include making it cloud-ready or enabling it to integrate with other planned or existing modern technologies, for instance.
• Replatforming – This could involve migrating the legacy system to a cloud-native environment.
• Rehosting – Shifting a legacy application to a new platform or environment with minimal changes to the code.
• Refactoring – Replacing certain pieces of code with new ones so as not to break the application and to make sure the functionality stays the same.
• Rearchitecting – Restructuring the source code of legacy systems to change the data flow and making it compatible with the latest requirements.

How Legacy Modernization Can Improve Your Business

Modernizing legacy technologies not only improves the security and overall performance of an organization but, in many cases, has now become a necessity for businesses to survive. The hidden cost of outdated technologies, as companies work to maintain archaic systems, is quite high. Such costs can be avoided by updating systems and streamlining transformational processes for better flexibility, user experience and performance.

To learn more, please read our eBook: Manage “Everything” with Unified Endpoint Management

The post Legacy Modernization: How It Improves Your Business appeared first on Kaseya.

Managed service providers either take over their clients’ entire IT operations or select IT or business functions, and oversee their smooth functioning on a day-to-day basis in exchange for a fee. Companies, for their part, turn to managed service providers to manage functions they aren’t staffed to support. Many small businesses, like doctor’s offices and local gyms, for example, have no IT staff on the payroll.

What Are Managed Services?

A managed service is any business function that an MSP manages and executes for its customers. It is often a non-revenue generating function of an organization that runs in the background, such as workforce management, payroll, IT management, etc.

But more often than not, when we talk about managed services, we usually mean managed IT services. After all, IT infrastructure is the backbone of any organization, big or small. Administering an internal IT environment is not only costly but also a time-consuming job. It involves finding the right talent and regularly investing in tools and services to deliver and manage IT services.

MSPs remotely monitor and manage a company’s IT infrastructure, usually for a monthly subscription fee. Depending on the customer’s requirements, managed service providers can either oversee a single IT function, like network monitoring or cybersecurity, or oversee the entire IT environment. Think hardware, software, networks, communications systems, cybersecurity, help desk, problem resolution and even strategic planning for the future.

What Are the Benefits of Managed Services?

Modern and updated IT infrastructures ensure superior connectivity, higher productivity and top-notch security. Here are some of the benefits of managed IT services:

Improved Efficiencies: Managed service providers help their customers improve business efficiency by ensuring that their systems stay up and running. Not having to worry about keeping the IT systems functioning, businesses can channel their resources toward their core competencies that drive revenue growth. More uptime translates to topline growth.

Scalability: Another advantage of managed IT services is scalability. Small and medium-sized businesses often grow faster than larger companies and require the flexibility to scale as they expand. Managed service providers make scaling their IT infrastructure up or down a breeze. They manage IT using the latest tools and technologies and leverage cloud services to expand capacity as needed.

Reduced Stress: IT infrastructure management involves executing a number of technical tasks. It can include endpoint management (desktops, laptops, servers), network management, compliance, help desk, repairs, routine maintenance, etc. Businesses would have to expend considerable resources to manage all of this themselves.

Managed service providers have qualified staff and sophisticated tools to look after the upkeep of their customers’ infrastructure at all times of the day. It enables them to take preventive measures and fix potential issues before they snowball into a crisis.

Having an internal IT team means working with a bunch of IT vendors. However, vendor management can become an expensive and cumbersome task. Service providers manage these tasks for their clients, freeing up plenty of time and resources for those clients to manage their businesses.

Better Cybersecurity: Cyberattacks are dominating the headlines globally. Increasingly complex and sophisticated cyberthreats follow close on the heels of technological advancements and cost businesses more than just money. It costs them their reputation and the trust of their customers.

When it comes to cybersecurity, prevention is better than cure. Managed service providers have the technology and the capability to monitor an organization’s IT infrastructure 24/7, 365 days a year, and take preventive measures that nip security problems in the bud.

Global spending on information security, risk management technology and services is expected to grow 12.4% to reach $150.4 billion in 2021, according to a report from Gartner.

Since service providers cannot neutralize every single threat out there, businesses must still be vigilant to avoid falling prey to phishing and malware attacks. A managed IT services provider will keep an eye out for suspicious activity and immediately notify the stakeholders to take corrective action.

Why Are Managed Services Important?

Even with the pandemic seemingly abating in various parts of the world, more and more companies are opting to partner with managed service providers. The advantage is a myriad of cost and operational efficiencies such as:

• Cost Visibility: Managed service providers typically follow a subscription business model and charge a fixed monthly fee. A fixed operational cost makes it easy for customers to plan budgets and make financial forecasts for their business.
• Lower Operational Cost: Hiring an internal IT team equates to higher overhead costs like salaries, benefits, office space, IT management tools and much more. Organizations can reduce these overhead costs with managed service providers in tow.
• Higher ROI: Managed service providers give organizations more bang for their buck since they can offer more services, and potentially higher quality services, for the same price it takes to put together a basic in-house IT team.
• Faster and Proactive Response: For a fixed cost, service providers look after a company’s IT infrastructure needs round the clock. They also give their customers access to a dedicated service desk that accepts and resolves queries at all times of the day. Due to continuous monitoring, managed service providers can often fix IT incidents before they become a major problem. It means fewer and shorter downtime instances for their clients.
• Enhanced Competitiveness: Managed service providers are quick to adopt the latest improvements in technology. It gives their customers an edge over their competitors since they face less downtime, more productive hours and can accomplish more in less time.

Furthermore, service providers can help their customers adopt and safely transition to newer technologies.

Managed Services vs. Similar Models

Managed services may be confused or used interchangeably with other similar business models. Let’s demystify the confusion in this section.

What Is the Difference Between Managed Services and Outsourcing?

Often, people use the term managed IT services and outsourced IT services interchangeably. The confusion stems from the broadly similar structure of these business arrangements. In both cases, a company delegates some of its business or IT tasks to a third-party team to improve efficiency and increase productivity.

However, there is a subtle difference. An outsourcing company will typically take up only a part of an IT task and complete it by following a specific set of instructions. This task is usually time-bound and the outsourcing company gets paid for its services for that period. A managed service provider, on the other hand, usually looks after a company’s complete IT infrastructure, taking all strategic decisions and actively making recommendations to the client to improve business operations. They also charge a monthly subscription fee.

What Is the Difference Between Managed Services and Staff Augmentation?

Organizations often face the need to hire specialists or consultants to take projects ahead. The hiring of additional staff to meet temporary work requirements is called staff augmentation. People hired for specific tasks get paid by the hour for their services and leave after completing the project. When an organization partners with an IT services provider, it typically hires the entire team.

What Is the Difference Between Managed Services and Professional Services?

Managed service providers look after the day-to-day running of an organization’s IT needs. Professional services, on the other hand, help solve specific IT challenges. The difference lies in the scope of work and time spent as a partner. Professional services generally work on one-time projects while managed services are in it for the long haul.

Managed Service Providers (MSP)

Managed service providers remotely and proactively manage the IT infrastructure of their SMB clients. They are a boon to small and medium-sized enterprises that often lack the financial bandwidth to hire a full-time IT team.

How Do Managed Service Providers Work?

Managed services providers offer a host of IT services to their customers in exchange for a monthly subscription fee. It gives them a recurring source of revenue that they can leverage to expand their business and hire more employees.

The subscription model, with monthly recurring revenue (MRR), ensures a predictable cash flow for the business, unlike the break-fix model, where the revenue flows sporadically, limiting the ability to plan and make business investments.

Managed services providers offer a range of services, but the foundation is remote monitoring and management (RMM). With a whole list of services to their credit, they can tailor custom-designed packages for their customers.

MSPs vary in size from one-person shops to much larger enterprises with hundreds of employees. Service providers can automate many of their IT management tasks using an RMM solution and use professional services automation (PSA) software to help them run the business. These tools allow managed services providers to cater to multiple clients with only a limited workforce, resulting in lower operational costs and higher profit margins.

The days ahead look bright for managed service providers. Their recurring revenue stream offers visibility and insights into their business health, making them an attractive target for investors. Post-pandemic economic recovery means the industry is poised to register booming growth.

How Many Managed Service Providers Are There?

The demand for managed service providers is only going to increase in the foreseeable future.

According to a report by MSP Resources, the United States is the largest market for managed service providers by revenue. It is estimated that there are about 130,000 managed services providers globally.

APAC is the fastest-growing region in this segment, driven by growth in the managed services market in countries like India and China.

In 2020, the global managed services market size was valued at $215.14 billion. It is forecasted to expand at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 12.7% from 2021 to 2028 according to Grand View Research.

Businesses pushing for lower IT budgets, increasing cyberattacks, high cost of data security, small and medium enterprises moving toward cloud adoption and less availability of skilled IT professionals are some of the factors driving growth in the sector.

Types of Managed Services

Most managed service providers start by offering endpoint and network management services. With time, they either expand their technology services or choose to specialize in a particular area of IT services such as security.

Endpoint and Network Management

MSPs manage their clients’ IT infrastructure including desktops, laptops, servers and network devices (routers, switches and printers). They frequently use an RMM solution to remotely monitor and manage these devices. Their services usually include software patch management to ensure that OSes and third-party applications are kept up to date. The overall objective is to maintain IT system and service uptime and availability for their clients.

IT Security Management

Data protection has become the top priority for companies due to increasing cyberattacks. Managed security providers remotely manage IT security for their clients. This may include antivirus and antimalware (AV/AM) deployment and management, advanced threat detection and prevention, managed firewalls, proactive remediation of a threat, log and compliance management and vulnerability scanning, among others.

MSPs focused on IT security (MSSPs) can leverage a managed Security Operations Center (SOC) to provide extensive security services to their clients.

Managed Support

Even the most highly managed IT environments experience glitches. That’s why managed service providers need to give their clients access to a service desk — a platform where customers can raise and track the progress of their tickets and service requests.

Cloud Infrastructure Management

It involves migrating, maintaining and optimizing a customer’s cloud infrastructure for public, private or hybrid cloud environments.

Managed Print

Managed print services cover all aspects of a company’s printing needs, including hardware requirements and scanning needs. They look at data and workflow management and optimize printing resources and energy usage to help reduce costs.

Backup and Disaster Recovery

The most valuable asset of many companies is data. Hence, it needs to be stored and backed up in the event of a system failure or cyberattack. Managed service providers offer backup and disaster recovery (BDR) services to help customers protect their data and recover gracefully in case of an accident or a cyberattack.

Compliance Management

Organizations face a growing number of government regulations including HIPAA, GDPR, PCI, NY SHEILD, CCPA and many more. MSPs provide compliance management services to keep their customers in compliance with all relevant regulations. This minimizes the risk of non-compliance penalties to the business.

Elevate Your Managed Services Business With Kaseya

During the pandemic, many companies turned to managed service providers to help them quickly meet new challenges. Post-pandemic, the time is ripe for managed service providers to grow their businesses through new service offerings, improved sales and marketing, and other strategies.

Kaseya and Kaseya VSA will help them do just that. Kaseya VSA is a unified remote monitoring and management (uRMM) tool that enables MSPs to manage traditional endpoints as well as a new generation of “devices” including virtual machines and cloud. It gives managed service providers complete visibility into their clients’ IT environments and helps increase operational efficiency through IT automation.

Get A Demo

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While VMs boost IT scalability, agility and flexibility, monitoring and managing a virtualized environment requires IT management tools that support this technology.

Today’s small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) rely on a hybrid environment that consists of a combination of on-premises and cloud-based infrastructure. According to the Spiceworks 2020 State of Virtualization Technology report, 77% of on-premises server workloads are virtualized. That’s why it’s important to be able to monitor and manage virtual hosts and VMs across your IT environment.

VMWare and Microsoft Hyper-V

VMWare and Microsoft Hyper-V are two leading server virtualization vendors. Hyper-V is a type-1, native hypervisor provided by Microsoft. It allows you to run multiple operating systems (OS) and VMs on a single physical server.

Similarly, VMware is a virtualization technology that allows you to run multiple OSes and VMs on the same physical machines.

Discovery and Mapping of Virtual Environments

While many Remote Monitoring and Management (RMM) tools have limited functionality, Kaseya VSA, a unified RMM solution, discovers and includes VMware and Hyper-V hosts and VMs on its network topology map. With Kaseya VSA, you can also see the host and guest VM relationships on the network topology map and get detailed VM information via the QuickView feature in VSA.

Kaseya VSA Network Topology Map showing the QuickView window for a Hyper-V VM

Virtual Environment Monitoring

Your RMM tool should not only leverage Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) but also application programming interface (API) and Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) monitoring capabilities. WMI is specifically used for monitoring Microsoft Hyper-V environments.

A unified RMM tool monitors virtual hosts for the following:

• Operational Status
• Uptime
• System Health
• Alarm Status
• Software Version
• CPU Core Status
• Number of vCPUs
• vCPU Utilization
• Physical Memory Utilization
• Virtual Memory Utlization
• Disk Status
• Network Traffic Volume
• etc.

It should also monitor Guests (VMs) for the following:

• Operational Status
• Uptime
• CPU Utilization
• CPU Ready Time
• Memory Utilization
• Memory Balloon
• Network In/Out
• Disk Space Utilization
• Available Disk Space
• etc.

Your RMM tool’s monitoring capabilities should include the ability to perform various actions, like the ones mentioned below, when an alert occurs:

• Generate an alarm in the RMM tool UI (shows an alarm icon on a node in the topology map)
• Create a service ticket
• Execute a script (agent procedure)
• Send an email notification

Managing “everything” in today’s complex IT environments means you need the capability to discover, map and monitor your virtual environments. Knowing what is in your virtual environment and how it functions is key to quickly identifying and resolving IT incidents.

Learn more by downloading the checklist: 11 THINGS TO MONITOR AND MANAGE WITH YOUR UNIFIED REMOTE MONITORING AND MANAGEMENT SOLUTION

You can also request a demo of Kaseya VSA.

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Ticket management in IT is the process of tracking, managing and resolving user requests and IT incidents. It is usually part of a company’s help desk and technical support system wherein internal employees, as well as external customers, in the case of Managed Service Providers (MSPs), can reach out to the company’s support team and submit requests for any IT issues they might be facing. Ticket management is typically carried out with the help of a help desk software solution.

Why Is Ticket Management Important?

The market for help desk software solutions is expected to reach USD 11 billion by 2023. An efficient ticket management system is imperative for streamlining, organizing and prioritizing your help desk requests as dictated by the criticality of the impacted IT service and level of difficulty of the query, instead of simply being dealt with in the order that they are received. As such, a well-designed ticket management system helps you maintain end-user and customer satisfaction. This is critical for MSPs to prevent customer churn.

How Does an IT Ticketing System Work? 

A basic ticket management system that implements manual ticketing follows a typical workflow: 

• The process begins with the help desk agent creating a ticket for a query or concern that was raised by a user.  
• The ticket is then assigned to a support rep. 
• The rep can work on the ticket and share the updates with the user. 
• 
The rep is notified of any responses from the user.
• Once the query is resolved, the ticket is closed. The ticket may be reopened in case the user has any follow-up requests or concerns. 

In the case of manual ticket resolution, an integration between the Service Desk and RMM solution allows technicians to easily remote into an endpoint from the ticket window to troubleshoot the issue. Workflow integration with the IT documentation solution also allows technicians to quickly pull up relevant asset information and resolve the issue faster. 

On the other hand, there are some ticket management solutions that provide automated ticket creation and remediation. For instance, Kaseya VSA (RMM) and Kaseya BMS/Vorex (PSA/Service Desk) allow tickets to be automatically created by Kaseya VSA in response to an alert on an endpoint or network device. Automated workflows in Kaseya BMS/Vorex allow tickets to be automatically resolved by executing Kaseya VSA agent procedures. 

Automation helps streamline your ticket management process, boost technician productivity, minimize manual errors, keep your end users and customers happy, and free up time for your technicians to focus on revenue-generating activities.

What Makes a Good Ticketing System? 

As discussed above, an efficient and reliable ticketing system allows organizations to streamline their service management/help desk operations. But what constitutes a good ticketing system? We’ve rounded up a list of key features to look for before investing in a ticket management system.

Automation — The solution should offer automated ticketing with streamlined workflows and advanced search/filtering functionalities. 

Organized Tracking — The solution should help you actively track:

• Ticket History: A record of previous tickets, issues and service history. 
• Communication Logs: A record of the interactions between the agents and customers. 
• KPIs and Performance Metrics: A record of response times, ticket resolution, customer satisfaction comments and so on. 

Prioritization – One of the most powerful features that a ticket management system should offer you is the ability to create priority queues that allow you to address the more important tickets (based on level of severity and complexity) instead of addressing them on a first-come-first-serve basis. 

Dashboards and Reporting – The solution should feature a dashboard that offers real-time information on the progress and status of tickets, allows you to easily generate custom reports and helps you gain insights to make the right business decisions quickly and confidently.

Collaboration – The solution should provide a platform that enables different teams to work together more efficiently on resolving tickets on the basis of expertise, service record and so on.

Service Level Agreements (SLAs) – In order to provide an element of accountability, the system should allow for the creation of clear goals and service standards that the agents can strive to achieve. 

Superior Customer Experience – In addition to well-defined SLAs, the solution should allow tickets to be addressed and resolved more quickly and with better accuracy, thus improving customer relations. Customer satisfaction correlates highly with speed of resolution of IT issues. Many companies track “First Contact Resolution rate.” 

Integrations With RMM and IT Documentation Tools – The solution should provide seamless integration with RMM and IT Documentation tools and enable technicians to easily remote into an endpoint from the ticket window to troubleshoot the issue. Integration with the IT Documentation solution also enables technicians to have key asset information readily available at their fingertips, which helps them resolve tickets faster. 

What Are the Benefits of a Good Ticketing System? 

Let’s summarize some of the key benefits of a good ticketing system:

• Increases operational efficiency of the help desk team
• Better prioritization of tickets based on level of severity and complexity 
• Higher quality IT service delivery due to faster ticket resolution
• Lower overhead costs for help desk staffing 
• Refinement of support processes with data received from other systems such as RMM and IT documentation
• Better communication and collaboration between the technician and the requester 
• Maintaining customer service standards 
• Tracking of important service metrics and KPIs
   

Ticket Management Best Practices

Here’s a list of important best practices to follow for more streamlined and efficient ticket management: 

• Create a User-Friendly Experience – Select help desk tools that provide a user-friendly interface and easy-to-use ticketing system. 
• Establish a Clear Prioritization System – Establish a priority queue and system for grading that minimizes the potential for costly disruptions to the business. 
• Identify & Document Common Issues – Look for patterns and document common issues and fixes; make it easy to access these documents from the ticketing system. 
• Focus on Evaluating the True Cost of Your Service Offering – Metrics like Mean Time To Resolution (MTTR), tickets per asset and cost per ticket can help you evaluate the true cost of your service offering. Make sure that your ticketing system offers reporting of key metrics. 
• Encourage Self Service & Enablement – Create a knowledge base so that customers can find answers on their own when possible and remediate their own issues. 
• Focus on Customer Experience and Solicit Feedback – Above all, be sure to keep the customer and customer experience in mind. Focus on how you can make it easier for them and improve your processes. 

Superior Ticket Management With Kaseya BMS 

Kaseya BMS is a comprehensive professional services automation (PSA) solution that enables you to run your IT managed services business more efficiently at a fraction of your current costs. In addition to its Service Desk/Ticketing system, Kaseya BMS offers many other useful features such as: 

• Project management
• Customer relationship management (CRM)
• Billing and finance
• Business Intelligence and reporting

Want to know more about boosting IT efficiency and improving customer service? Request a demo of Kaseya BMS now! 

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As the name suggests, a cloud service provider is essentially a third-party company that offers a cloud-based platform for application, infrastructure or storage services. A cloud service provider generally establishes public cloud platforms, manages private cloud platforms and/or offers on-demand cloud computing services such as:

• Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS)
• Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)
• Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS)
• Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS)

What Is a Public Cloud?

In a public cloud, all of the hardware, software, networking and storage infrastructure is owned and managed by the cloud service provider. The public cloud infrastructure is heavily based on virtualization technologies to provide efficient, scalable computing power and storage. The public cloud provider makes these resources available to customers over the internet.

Since you pay only for the amount of cloud services you use, based on your business requirements, adopting cloud computing can help in reducing business costs as compared to owning and operating on-premises datacenters.

Cloud adoption also provides businesses with flexibility and scalability by not restricting them to the physical limitations of on-premises servers. In addition, you can also take advantage of the reliability of multiple cloud data centers as well as responsive and customizable load balancing that evolves with your changing demands.

In this blog, we’ll compare the three leading public cloud providers, namely Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud.

According to a Canalys report, the global spending on cloud infrastructure grew a sizeable 33% to $142 billion in 2020, with AWS having 31% of the market share, followed by Microsoft Azure at 20% and Google Cloud at 7%.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) Overview

A subsidiary of Amazon, AWS was launched in 2006 and offers on-demand cloud computing services on a metered, pay-as-you-go basis. It is one of the most comprehensive and broadly adopted public cloud platforms across the globe. As one of Amazon’s strongest revenue segments, AWS generated a whopping 45$ billion in net sales in 2020.

Common cloud functionalities offered by AWS that can help businesses scale and grow include:

• Networking and content delivery
• Analytics
• Migration
• Database storage
• Compute power
• Developer tools
• Security, identity and compliance
• Artificial intelligence
• Customer engagement
• Internet of Things
• Desktop and app streaming

What Are the Advantages of AWS?

Let’s look at some of the major advantages of AWS:

Ease of Sign-Up

One of the key benefits of adopting AWS is that the onboarding process is a breeze. All you need to provide are a few key credentials and you’re good to go. There is no need to sign an agreement. If you’re unsure, you can opt for the one-year free tier that includes a bunch of the most popular AWS services free of charge up to a certain limit.

Scalability and Elasticity

AWS offers the Auto Scaling service that allows you to easily scale up, down or out your computing resources depending on your changing business requirements.

Along with scalability, you can also leverage the Elastic Load Balancer service to distribute your incoming application traffic across several different targets including containers, messaging services, instances, IP addresses and more.

Access to a Diverse Range of Tools

AWS offers an array of dynamic services such as virtual private cloud (VPC), elastic compute cloud (EC2), simple storage service (S3), relational database service, AWS Lambda and more.

Easy Training and Certifications

Apart from detailed documentation for each of its services, Amazon also offers training and certification programs for the users to gain a better understanding of the usage and application of AWS.

Greater Security

AWS ensures end-to-end security for its cloud infrastructure by implementing software, physical and operational measures wherever required.

Cost-Efficient

With no up-front commitments or long-term contracts, you pay only for the resources (storage, compute power, etc.,) you use. This reduces your IT operational costs and helps boosts profits.

What Are the Disadvantages of AWS?

As with every technology, AWS has its own set of disadvantages as well. Some of these are:

Limitations of Amazon EC2

There are default limits set for AWS resources, such as snapshots, volumes and images, that vary from one region to another. As such, the user is allowed to launch only a certain number of instances per area. In addition, there is a limitation on the availability of information for the resources that are managed by Amazon VPC and Amazon EC2 consoles.

Charges for Technical Support

You will be charged a fee for technical support based on the package you opt for, namely developer, business or enterprise. There is a pricing list that defines the standard pricing for the packages.

Security Limitations

As a security measure, AWS has implemented limitations on some of its features, such as EC-2 classic and EC2-VPC, with no room for any customization.

Cost Management Limitations

One of the key disadvantages of AWS is that it can be difficult for users to optimize costs across on-demand and reserved instances.

Microsoft Azure Overview

Commonly referred to as simply Azure, Microsoft Azure is a cloud computing service that was introduced by tech-giant Microsoft back in 2010 for the purpose of testing, building, deploying and managing services and applications. According to Forbes, 63% of enterprises are currently running apps on Azure.

Some of the key functionalities that Azure offers include:

• Computing power
• Database storage
• Content delivery network (CDN)
• Caching
• Business Analytics
• SQL database
• Virtual services
• Application and infrastructure migration
• Media services
• Mobile services

What Are the Advantages of Azure Cloud?

Some of the major advantages of Azure Cloud are listed below:

High Scalability and Availability

Owing to Microsoft’s vast global footprint, Azure offers high scalability and availability to its users. In addition, Azure is well-equipped to scale up or down, depending on the changing needs of your business. You can modify the computing power required with just a few clicks.

Analytics and Intelligence Capabilities

One of the key benefits of Azure is that it offers SQL and NoSQL data services and provides built-in support for gaining deep and meaningful insights into the strategies that businesses can adopt to improve their operations and decision-making. Also, it might be interesting to note that Azure is the only cloud platform that offers unique capabilities like cognitive APIs, bots, machine learning and Blockchain-as-a-Service (BaaS).

Cost Efficiency

You can opt for the pay-as-you-go payment plan offered by Azure to have the level of control you need to make sure that you don’t exceed your IT budgets. Leveraging Azure’s SaaS applications helps reduce your infrastructure costs and the expenses of maintaining and managing your IT environment.

Compliance, Security and Disaster Recovery

Azure is one of the most secure cloud platforms out there. With its array of compliance certifications, Azure has emerged as the preferred cloud platform for high-risk industries such as government agencies and healthcare. Azure provides high-end protection for its customers and offers additional services, such as multifactor authentication and enterprise-grade disaster recovery capabilities, that help secure and recover your critical business data with minimum downtime.

What Are the Disadvantages of Azure Cloud?

The disadvantages of Azure Cloud include:

Regular Management Required

In order to make efficient use of Azure, you need to hire Azure experts that can handle server monitoring and patching of your cloud infrastructure. That said, while you do save a lot of money from not having to purchase hardware or locally maintain your IT infrastructure, you will still need to spend on hiring professionals that can help you manage the platform.

Platform Expertise Required

As opposed to local servers, deploying Azure requires platform expertise for it to run efficiently. Over-provisioning of cloud services is one of the most common mistakes that admins make due to a lack of awareness and understanding of the inner workings of the cloud servers.

Google Cloud Platform Overview

Launched by Google in 2008, Google Cloud is a suite of cloud computing services that operates on the same infrastructure that is used by Google internally for its most popular end-user products including YouTube, Gmail, Google Search and file storage.

Major functionalities of Google Cloud include:

• Big data services
• Compute engines
• Live migration
• Internet of Things (IoT)
• Cloud management
• Machine intelligence
• Networking
• Cloud storage
• Identity and security

What Are the Advantages of Google Cloud?

Google Cloud offers a host of benefits such as:

Google-Grade Security

One of the major advantages of Google Cloud is that it operates on Google’s unique security model that features an end-to-end security process, developed as a result of over 15 years of experience focused on customer security on apps like Google Apps and Gmail.

Live Migration

Unlike Azure and AWS, Google Cloud offers live migration of virtual machines (VMs). As such, there is no change in cloud performance even when the VMs are being migrated. Since your VMs will always be up and running, the Google Cloud engineers are better equipped to resolve updating and patching issues more efficiently.

Environment-Friendly

As compared to typical data centers, Google Cloud data centers run on relatively low energy and utilize 100% renewable energy wherever available.

High Reliability

In the event of an incident that disrupts a data center from functioning, the system switches to a secondary data center, ensuring that the users do not face any business interruption.

What Are the Disadvantages of Google Cloud?

A few of the aspects in which Google Cloud misses the mark include:

Insufficient and Expensive Support

One of the major drawbacks of Google Cloud is that the support offered for customer issues is not the best in class. All users of the platform are offered free-of-charge Bronze-level support by default. However, you can buy the Silver, Gold or Platinum package to avail additional support services. However, the charges for these higher-level packages are quite high.

Less Choice of Functionalities

Compared to its competitors AWS and Azure, Google Cloud offers a smaller range of cloud services.

AWS vs. Azure vs. Google Cloud

In this section, we’ll do a service-based comparison of AWS, Azure and Google Cloud to help you better understand which one suits you best.

Compute Services

Database Services

Storage Services

Networking Services

Pricing

Conclusion

Regardless of which cloud platform you choose, you need to manage and optimize your usage to keep costs under control.

Want to know how Kaseya VSA can help you with that? Request a demo today!

The post AWS vs. Azure vs. Google Cloud: Comparing Cloud Platforms appeared first on Kaseya.

The number of mobile devices operating worldwide is expected to reach 17.72 billion by 2024, an increase of 3.7 billion devices compared to 2020 levels.

MSPs are in a position to meet the explosive demand for efficient management of these endpoints. However, many MSPs use poorly integrated and limited tools to manage their clients’ environments, which decreases their operational efficiency and adversely affects their bottom line.

MSPs can implement Unified Remote Monitoring and Management (uRMM) tools that go beyond the current concept of RMM, where only traditional devices and endpoints are managed.

The concept of unified RMM is built on three factors:

• Complete – A unified RMM solution manages all endpoints and devices across all IT environments, including on-premises, cloud, hybrid IT and work from home, all from a single console.
• Automated – A unified RMM solution automates a wide range of IT processes and streamlines workflows across IT tools, increasing IT team efficiency and productivity by 25% or more.
• Priced Right – This means that the uRMM solution provides hard cost-savings over traditional RMMs. In addition, by managing all devices and IT environments through a single, unified solution, MSPs can eliminate unnecessary point tools, which further reduces licensing costs. With automation and integrated workflows comes increased operational efficiency and lower costs. All these factors result in a much higher return on investment (ROI) than traditional RMMs.

Capabilities of a Unified RMM Solution

A uRMM platform maximizes MSP technician efficiency with:

Automated Discovery and Topology Mapping of All Devices

The process of discovery of all endpoints and network devices, including virtual hosts and VMs for VMware and Microsoft Hyper-V, and cloud infrastructure for services such as Microsoft Azure and AWS, is automated with a unified RMM solution. Visibility into cloud resources, such as SQL instances, cloud applications and load balancers, is also provided by the solution.

Monitoring and Management of All Endpoints and Devices

While some RMM tools extend their capabilities to mobile device management (MDM), a unified RMM tool does more than that. It monitors and manages VMs, cloud infrastructure and IoT devices. With more businesses moving to a “digital-first” strategy and adopting cloud services, the growth of application containers and VMs has never been higher. Efficiently managing these virtual and connected devices to maintain system and service availability is extremely critical to an MSP client’s success.

Benefits of Unified RMM

As mentioned earlier, along with increased technician efficiency and productivity, a uRMM solution empowers MSPs with the following benefits as well:

Reduced IT costs

Eliminating poorly integrated point tools drives cost savings on licenses and reduces training efforts for technicians.

Faster resolution of service tickets and better service delivery

With a centralized management platform and comprehensive visibility, you can remediate issues quickly, keep IT service up and running, and keep your customers satisfied.

Time saved by managing “everything” from a single console

MSP technicians now need not spend their precious time switching between different tools to get issues resolved. With a uRMM solution, they can discover, manage and remediate incidents from a single platform.

Unified RMM will empower MSPs to meet the current and future needs of their clients. It can help your MSP deliver higher quality services at lower cost.

Learn more about the powerful uRMM solution, Kaseya VSA. Request a demo today.

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What Are Containers?

Containers may be described as packages that include everything needed to run a single application or micro service. This includes its dependencies and run-time libraries. Containers allow the application to be run quickly and reliably from anywhere, right from desktop computers to physical and virtual servers and even the cloud.

The container is abstracted away from the host operating system (OS). Each container shares the OS kernel with other containers rather than including its own full OS. Access to underlying OS resources is limited. As such, a containerized application can be run on different infrastructure types such as the cloud, virtual machine, bare metal and so on, without the need for refactoring the application for each IT environment.

Since containers typically share the machine’s OS kernel and don’t have the overhead of having a full OS within each container, they are often regarded as being more “lightweight” than virtual machines (VMs).

How Does Containerization Work?

Containerization may be defined as a type of OS virtualization wherein applications are run within isolated user spaces (containers) that all share the same OS kernel. It is the encapsulation of an application and the environment required to run it so it can be efficiently and consistently run across several different computing platforms.

Containerization is emerging as the preferred approach for software development and DevOps pipelines. The creation and deployment of applications are faster and more secure with containerization.

When code is developed using traditional methods in a specific computing environment and transferred to a different computing platform, it can often result in errors. However, containerization effectively eliminates this problem by encapsulating the entire application code along with its related libraries, dependencies and configuration files required for it to run.

Pros and Cons of ContainerizationLike every technology out there, containerization has its fair share of advantages and disadvantages that you must take into consideration.

Pros of Containerization

• One of the major advantages of containerization is that it provides a fast and lightweight infrastructure for you to run your applications. The relatively lightweight containers are more flexible, and you can create and move them more quickly than VMs.
• Containerization supports policy-based optimization. You can use an automation layer to locate, auto-migrate and execute on the best platform.
• Containerization is helpful in lowering your software development and operational costs.
• Containerization also provides greater scalability. Compared to VMs, many more containers can be created and run on a physical server since they don’t require a full OS to be included in each container. In addition, monolithic applications can be broken down into smaller micro services using containers. You can then scale and distribute the individual features.

Cons of Containerization

• One of the major drawbacks of containerization technology is that it requires a significant amount of work to set up in an organization so that it performs efficiently.
• Since the technology is relatively recent, the required application support and dependencies still remain insufficient.
• It’s hard to find qualified container developers.
• Containers share the host OS kernel. That said, in the event of the kernel becoming vulnerable, all the associated containers would become vulnerable too.
• Container technology can be more expensive in terms of application development costs.

What Problems Do Containers Solve?

As per a forecast by GartnerInc., the global container management revenue is estimated to witness strong growth from $465.8 million in 2020 to a sizable $944 million in 2024.Gartner also predicts that by the year 2022, north of 75% of global businesses will likely be running containerized applications in production.

The containerization technology provides tremendous portability across computing platforms and environments. It allows the developers to write the application once and then run it anywhere they like.

Being a key component of the private cloud, containers are fast emerging as a game-changer for many businesses. Private cloud has become the favored approach for organizations to deliver the flexibility and control required while also enabling efficient consumption of multiple cloud services.

What Are Virtual Machines?

A virtual machine (VM) may be described as a virtual environment where each VM is a complete virtual computer with its own guest OS, virtual memory, CPU, storage and network interface. VMs function as software-defined virtual computers running on physical servers.

Usually referred to as a guest, a VM is created within a physical computing environment called a “host.” Multiple VMs can share the resources of a single host such as memory, network bandwidth and CPU cycles and run concurrently. However, each VM will have its own OS and operate independently of other VMs that might be located on the same host.

How Does Virtualization Work?

As the foundation of cloud computing, server virtualization enables more efficient utilization of physical computer hardware. You can utilize the full capacity of a physical machine by running multiple VMs on a single server.

Server virtualization is executed by running a virtual instance of a computer system within a layer, called a hypervisor, that is abstracted from the actual hardware. The hypervisor allocates hardware resources, such as CPUs, memory and storage, to each VM. Server virtualization allows running more than one OS on a single computer system at the same time.

The global virtualization software market is estimated to see a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of nearly 30% over the next two years.

There are four types of virtualization:

• Server Virtualization – With over 90% of businesses in Europe and North America using it, server virtualization is the most common type of virtualization.Server virtualization segregates one physical server into several isolated virtual server instances, as described above.
• Network Virtualization – Network virtualization allows for the creation of abstract versions of physical network resources, including firewalls, routers and switches, within separate layers of the virtual network.
• Storage Virtualization – Storage virtualization abstracts, aggregates and manages multiple physical storage resources to make them look like a single, centralized storage pool. The storage resources can be from different vendors and networks.
• Desktop Virtualization – Creates a virtual version of the workstation, along with its operating system, that can be accessed remotely.

Pros and Cons of Virtualization

Let’s discuss some of the major advantages and disadvantages of virtualization.

Pros of Virtualization

• One of the key benefits of virtualization technology is that it enables efficient hardware utilization. You can create multiple virtual instances on the same hardware and reduce hardware costs.
• Increased uptime and availability is another upside of virtualization. With capabilities such as fault tolerance, storage migration, live migration, distributed resource scheduling and high availability, VMs allow IT to quickly recover from unforeseen outages.
• Virtualization helps lower IT operational costs since it requires a smaller number of hardware servers and associated resources to achieve the same level of scalability, availability and performance. This means less time managing and maintaining hardware resources.
• Backup, duplication and recovery are relatively easier and quicker with virtualization. With real-time data backup and mirroring, there is negligible data loss and quick recovery from the last saved state that was mirrored on a separate virtual instance.

Cons of Virtualization

• With the initial setup cost of storage and servers being higher than usual, the high initial investment is one of the major downsides of virtualization.
• In order to implement and manage a virtualized environment, you need to train your IT staff or hire experts that are well-versed in virtualization technologies.
• Testing is critical to ensure your systems work flawlessly in a virtualized environment.

What Problems Are Solved With Virtual Machines?

Organizations today often require many servers in different physical locations, each operating at their highest capacity, to drive efficiency and ROI. As such, it has become a standard practice to use virtualization to increase the utilization of computing resources.The key idea behind virtualization was to boost the efficiency of IT systems.

Virtualization helps boost IT scalability, flexibility and agility while reducing operational costs.In addition, availability of resources, increased performance, automated operations and workload mobility are some of the reasons why virtualization has become mainstream in the IT industry.

The 2020 State of Virtualization Technology report predicts that by 2021, the rate at which enterprises adopt virtualization technology is estimated to grow significantly. While 75% of enterprises are likely to adopt application virtualization, nearly 69% are expected to start using desktop virtualization.

Containers vs. Virtual Machines: What’s the Difference?

In this section, we’ll discuss the key distinguishing factors between the two technologies. The diagram below shows that VMs each have their own “Guest” OS and sit on top of the hypervisor layer. Each VM has its own binaries and library files. Containers, on the other hand, may share binaries and libraries and don’t contain an OS. There’s a container engine in place of the hypervisor.

Here’s a comparison table:

When Should You Use Containers?

Containers might be the right choice if you’re looking to cater to your short-term application needs. Since containers are portable and can be set up and started up quickly, they can help elastically scale your applications to align with demand. Examples include event-driven video streaming, web service delivery, insurance claims or online order fulfillment.You should opt for containerization when your priority is to maximize the number of applications you’re running on a minimal number of servers. However, containers have the limitation of not being supported by dedicated storage resources and processing and operating systems.Containers are well-suited for packaging micro services and building cloud-native apps.

When Should You Use Virtual Machines?

VMs are the best option for businesses that need to run multiple applications that require the comprehensive functionality and support of a dedicated OS.VMs are best suited for applications that you need to use for extended time periods and run within a virtualized environment that is more versatile and secure.

Virtualization is better suited for housing traditional, legacy, monolithic workloads, provisioning infrastructural resources, running one OS inside another and isolating risky development cycles.

Monitoring Your Virtual Environment

When it comes to monitoring and managing your virtual servers, make sure that your endpoint management tool provides complete visibility into your virtual environment so you can quickly identify issues and resolve them.

Kaseya VSA discovers the two most popular virtualization infrastructures, VMWare and Microsoft Hyper-V, and includes hosts and VMs on its Network Topology Map.

Learn more about Kaseya VSA. Request a demo today!

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Until the pandemic hit businesses in full force in 2020, high levels of mergers and acquisitions (M&A) activity were seen in the MSP industry. Post COVID-19, the state of MSP M&A is yet to be decided. But, there are strong indications that M&A activity is ramping up again. In this blog, we delve deeper into how mergers and acquisitions can benefit an MSP and what strategies MSPs are adopting in the new normal. 

The post Mergers and Acquisitions: Pros and Cons for MSPs appeared first on Kaseya.

This is precisely why businesses today are considering a cautious “hybrid work” approach when it comes to returning to the workplace. Introducing a hybrid work culture is an attempt at revamping the traditional work culture to achieve both employee satisfaction and an optimal work environment by leveraging the right technology and resources.

In this blog, we aim to shed light on what hybrid work truly is, its pros and cons, and why it is worth considering.

What Does ‘Hybrid Work’ Mean?

As the name suggests, a hybrid work model is a combination of two aspects — the structure and sociability of working from an office, and the independence and flexibility of working from home. There’s no set structure to a hybrid work environment. Businesses can frame it as per their needs and the expectations of their employees. In principle, hybrid work is aimed at granting more freedom to employees to fit work around other aspects of their lives rather than having them plan out their lives over the week during office hours.

What is the difference between remote work and hybrid work?

Remote work allows employees to work outside the traditional office environment, which is exactly what transpired in 2020. When working remotely, employees can usually execute their work responsibilities by accessing the office network from a remote location (mostly, their homes).

On the other hand, the hybrid work model designates certain days for in-office work and other days for remote work that requires individual focus. It is based on the idea that an employee’s physical presence in the office isn’t always necessary for work to be carried out.

Considerations Before Moving to a Hybrid Workplace

Many businesses have had to consider adopting a hybrid work model due to increasing employee expectations as well as certain compelling benefits that this model brings. For instance, 55% of U.S. workers want a mix of home and office-based work, while in the UK, employers expect the percentage of regular home workers to reach 37% post-pandemic as compared to 18% in the pre-pandemic phase.

Although hybrid work can enhance flexibility and employee happiness or satisfaction, it could also prove to be a fairly costly affair. To ensure a smooth transition, businesses will have to provide employees with all the equipment and resources (including furniture) they need while also keeping office space and equipment intact. Besides adding to operational costs, hybrid work adds more complexities to key business functions such as IT management.

Is Hybrid Work the “New Normal” for Businesses?

In a post-pandemic world, certain businesses may allow their entire workforce to work remotely while others may require all their employees to return to the office. However, a significant number will settle for something between the two. Over 80% of executives intend to let employees work remotely at least some of the time as compared to 47% who say they will allow employees to work remotely full time.

On one hand, remote work is here to stay, while on the other hand, it will not be the only preferred work model. A McKinsey report stated that 61% of the workforce in the U.S. can work no more than a few hours a week remotely or not at all. Similarly, a Stanford report estimated working from home to remain at an optimal level of about two days a week after the pandemic. All things considered, the hybrid work model will serve as the “new normal” for most businesses.

However, we must not forget that hybrid work may not be the best bet for every business. Considering the complexities and costs involved, some businesses will err on the side of caution when it comes to implementing a hybrid work environment.

Which companies should let employees work from home?

Businesses operating in sectors such as finance, management, professional services and technology could benefit more from a hybrid work model than ones in real estate, healthcare, utilities, retail trade, manufacturing, construction and hospitality.

Benefits of the Hybrid Work Model

Having established what a hybrid work model is, it’s time to skim through some of the major benefits it could bring to your business. Remember, putting together a comprehensive implementation strategy is key to drawing all potential benefits.

Increased Productivity

Does remote working improve productivity?

Recent studies have shown a rise in productivity among employees working remotely. According to a survey by Owl Labs, 75% of remote workers were equally or more productive during the pandemic phase. A study by Stanford of 16,000 workers over nine months found that working from home increased productivity by 13% on average. Conversely, 18% of remote workers found it hard to unplug from work and 40% have experienced mental exhaustion from video calls. So, while productivity has gone up with remote work, employee stress levels have also risen in some cases.

Reduced Overhead Costs

Do companies save money with remote employees?

A report by Global Workplace Analytics found that almost six out of 10 employers identify cost savings as a major benefit of employees working remotely. Businesses with a remote workforce can cut costs related to rent and utilities, cleaning services, food and taxes. For example, Dow Chemical saved over 30% in non-real estate costs after transitioning to a remote workforce.

Standardized Communication

How do remote teams communicate best?

By leveraging virtual communication tools, such as team messaging and video conferencing, businesses have managed to close the communication gap between remote employees. According to a report by Owl Labs, over 30% of businesses have introduced new tools for virtual meetings and remote workers are using video meetings 50% more than they were before the pandemic.

Valued Work/Life Balance

Are remote workers happy?

Owing to the improved work/life balance remote work has facilitated, nearly 60% of Americans think COVID-19 has changed the way they work for the better, according to a WalletHub study. Studies have shown how professionals have preferred the freedom to work while being closer to family while also avoiding time-consuming commutes to the office.

Improved Retention and Recruitment

Do remote work options help with employee retention?

Remote work has profoundly transformed employee retention. Over 50% of office workers would leave their current job if they could get one with more flexibility. Moreover, U.S. businesses that allow remote working will have a 25% lower employee turnover rate according to the State of Remote Work 2020 Report.

Disadvantages of the Hybrid Work Model

Along with its evident benefits, the hybrid work model also presents several challenges to businesses of all sizes, especially with respect to managing employees, ensuring a healthy work culture and keeping the network safe from lurking security threats. Let’s take a look at some of the prominent ones.

Limited Visibility

Does quality of work suffer with remote employees?

Remote employees may be logging longer hours and increasing productivity, but the ability of businesses to oversee and ensure quality work has diminished. In a survey conducted by the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), over one-third of employers admitted that they are facing difficulties with upholding company culture and worker productivity due to remote work.

Managerial Challenges

How do you manage a hybrid team?

From a managerial standpoint, a hybrid team is a lot harder to manage when it comes to setting expectations, keeping team morale up, establishing equity, ensuring the right amount of flexibility, watching out for signs of burnout and more.

Collaboration Barriers

What if I can’t get in touch with a remote employee?

The inability to connect and collaborate with a remote colleague in time is a challenge most businesses have had to grapple with. It’s no wonder that 20% of employees find lack of collaboration and communication to be among the biggest struggles of working remotely.

Reduced Social Engagement

How do you build team morale remotely?

As per the Owl Labs report, nearly 30% of U.S. employees miss being around their colleagues in the office and loneliness emerged as the second biggest challenge to remote work. Building team morale in such a scenario is bound to be more challenging than usual.

Heightened Security Needs

How do you maintain security when employees work remotely?

The unprecedented surge in remote work has helped cybercrime flourish over the past year. An 80% increase in cybercrime in 2020 has made building robust cybersecurity resilience even more critical. Ignoring it could be devastating for businesses as cybersecurity threats in 2021 aren’t going to be any easier to deal with.

Ensuring an Efficient and Secure Hybrid-Work Environment

To manage a successful hybrid-work environment, look for a unified endpoint management (UEM) solution, such as Kaseya VSA, that is comprehensive (manages all devices and environments), efficient (powerful IT automation capabilities), scalable and affordable. Kaseya VSA can help you ensure high productivity (with the ability to maintain endpoint and network uptime) and optimal security (with the ability to manage patching, antivirus/anti-malware and backup) required to meet the challenges of a hybrid work environment.

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