Affording Evergreen IT: The Benefits of Third-Party Service Management

Tech debt doesn’t happen overnight. At most enterprise organizations, this debt is accumulated through years and decades of adding patchwork solutions to a technology stack built upon legacy solutions.

In the 1980s and 1990s, companies like IBM have made a substantial profit off of selling legacy to enterprise organizations, making sure those businesses were fully dependent on that infrastructure to support their operations. Those companies enriched themselves even further by charging businesses over the years to maintain those legacy infrastructures through security patches and other modest updates.

Before long, a lot of businesses found themselves paying for technology the same way they pay their taxes. Even when an enterprise finance department looks at the numbers and approaches IT about reducing them, IT inevitably concedes that the cost and disruption of transitioning out of a legacy infrastructure is too costly and resource-intensive.

While the complexity of leaving legacy technology behind is no small challenge for businesses to overcome, it’s possible with the right expert partners to guide you in untangling legacy infrastructures while enabling evergreen IT and all the benefits it provides.

Most in-house IT departments lack the expertise or bandwidth to scale back legacy reliance and lead a seamless shift toward evergreen IT environments. But a third-party service management partner can build a blueprint for cutting down IT costs, reallocating those funds to IT transformation, and managing an intensive migration project that can make legacy IT a thing of the past.

Here’s how a trusted TPSM partner can help make evergreen IT an affordable initiative at your enterprise organization.

Specialized IT Experts to Support Your In-House Team

One of the biggest barriers to evergreen IT transformation is the workload already placed on enterprise IT departments. Too often, these teams are already stretched thin just keeping up with day-to-day IT management tasks. Given those commitments, adding a massive IT transformation project to the department’s to-do list can seem daunting, if not impossible.

This is where an outside partner likely delivers the greatest value for enterprise brands. No matter what kind of commitments your in-house IT is already facing, a TPSM partner specializing in evergreen IT can quickly integrate into your IT operations to lay out a strategy for managing this transformation even as in-house IT focuses on important day-to-day infrastructure management. From strategy development to execution to handing over evergreen IT management to your in-house staff, these outside partners make massive IT overhauls possible.

Reduced Day-to-Day Management Costs

The constant iteration and updating of legacy software is more than a resource drain on your IT department. This ongoing support also carries a significant cost, and the cost is rarely supported by the value these services deliver: companies like IBM typically earn around a 95 percent margin on legacy IT management services, while their customers receive scarcely more value or functionality than an occasional security patch.

With a more holistic IT infrastructure, your business will have less need for cost-intensive management services—and you’ll be able to seek out an alternative provider where the amount you pay is commensurate with the value those services provide.

Ongoing Protection of Your Evergreen Investment

Legacy IT infrastructures did not age well—and as businesses consider transforming their IT infrastructure, they’re focused on the long-term value and possible challenges any new infrastructure solution may offer.

While cloud-based IT is inherently agile and flexible to your needs, a trusted TPSM partner can also mitigate these risks through their continued presence after the transformation is complete. By providing backup and support for IT management challenges you may face in the future—ranging from application downtime to full-service disruptions—these service relationships can provide the assurance and stability many enterprise organizations need when considering massive infrastructure projects.

Better Utilization of In-House IT Resources

In-house IT professionals are rarely suited to undertake the complex untangling and migration required for any enterprise shift from legacy to evergreen IT infrastructures. By alleviating their day-to-day management tasks, you can reallocate these skill-sets to other areas of need.

As enterprise tech debt declines, your TPSM partner can train and support in-house IT to assume control of a new cloud-based IT infrastructure. As your in-house team becomes acclimated to the new demands of this role, those internal resources can then be moved around to support other projects and initiatives requiring IT support.

Where your IT department was previously too busy to do anything more than keep your enterprise ship afloat, you might discover that those IT professionals are more available, and are now more invigorated, to help you identify new goals for your organization to tackle.

If legacy IT feels like a prison of its own making, evergreen IT offers a better path. Learn more about the benefits of reducing tech debt through enterprise IT transformation—

 or get in touch with us today.