Lower Operational Costs with Managed Services Anywhere

Companies struggling to keep pace with rapid technological change may find it hard to retain existing staff with high-demand skillsets while keeping operating costs sustainable and predictable.

As an example, look at company with a blended multi-modal environment of legacy applications in a private cloud environment, applications that have moved to a public cloud infrastructure, and several new applications being developed cloud native.

The skills required to support existing or legacy applications are not necessarily the same ones required to support a cloud-native application on a public cloud, let alone multiple public clouds. Hiring for those positions presents administrative and financial challenges, putting the IT team into a difficult position as it tries to maintain production environments, support development teams, and expand skillsets to stay relevant in the market.

Let’s run through some numbers. The average salary for a cloud engineer, according to indeed.com, is $119,020. If you apply the industry standard cost multiplier of 1.7 for fully loaded cost, one cloud engineer costs $202,334 annually.

But that’s still only part of the story. You still need to account for off-hours support. Even accounting for lower-cost offshore support options, 24×7 support will likely increase your cost to $505,835 (2.5x), and they’ll likely be significantly higher if you’re based in an expensive area like Seattle, Chicago, or New York City.

According to the recent 451 Research Cloud Price Index: The Economics of Support and Managed Services, that means you could save a substantial amount by outsourcing enough operational tasks to reduce the time your engineer spends per VM (on average) by just 7 minutes.

To address the need for a consistent support model at an acceptable cost, Lumen® Managed Services Anywhere leverages our Cloud Application Manager platform to provide customers a consistent experience across public and private clouds, and to have access to a large staff of trained and experienced multi-disciplined professionals.

Our team of support professionals leverages the ITIL framework for incident response, provides a 24×7 global staff, and gives you a single point of contact, regardless of the cloud your workload is deployed to.

This service includes many tasks that other providers consider extras. For example, most providers charge a substantial extra fee for database administration, but it’s included in our base fee. For deeper technical support, Advanced Managed Services offers flexibility and control with the ability to customize subscription needs and term options to match immediate, ongoing or evolving requirements.

We also include full access to a technical account manager (TAM) that is familiar with your public cloud environment, your private cloud, network, and any other hosted services managed by Lumen. With one point of contact for support issues within your entire managed infrastructure, the support process is significantly streamlined and finger-pointing becomes a non-issue if an incident arises.

Managed Services Anywhere saves money by leveraging a single platform for all of your support issues, avoids the cost of having to hire and retain highly sought after talent, and gives you easy access to a broad team that is well versed in not just your cloud, but all clouds.

Stretching IT budgets, optimizing their network, increasing security, or being able to respond faster to business demands requires a combination of networking and solutions experience that makes Lumen a strong partner for enabling customers’ digital transformation needs.

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