IT departments today find themselves pinned between meeting expectations of business units based on managed service provider promises and a wealth of new technology options. Oh, and no pressure — business revenue is increasingly dependent on IT getting it right.

Enterprise IT has traditionally been regarded as quite different from the Managed Service Provider model. As more and more technology is moving to the “as a service” model, IT groups are in a position to consider themselves as the core service provider for the enterprise. It’s not that big of a stretch. Considering enterprise customers true customers, not coworkers, but customers with real requirements and options for where they spend their money. This isn’t new — not acknowledging it is the source of Shadow IT.

MSPs compete for every customer and have to evaluate their offerings, services and pricing on an ongoing basis. It’s not a monopoly; the competition is constantly innovating and trying to anticipate the needs of the customer. To a degree, Enterprise IT needs to do the same. But as a core service provider, Enterprise IT has the chance to pick and choose the services provided internally, and which ones to pick an external provider to deliver for the enterprise.

One aspect of an MSP model is to provide customers with some flexibility and individualized reporting on their usage. This is often lost in Enterprise roll-outs where there is a one-size-fits-all approach that can lead to customer groups with larger or smaller applications feeling dissatisfied and going rogue with their IT needs.

Finally, for internal IT to be a core service provider for the enterprise, customers have to know what you have available. Advertising internally and promoting successful use cases is critical to becoming a trusted adviser.

OOB as a managed service

Uplogix provides a number of key features that are enjoyed by Managed Service Providers that also can be applied by Enterprise IT to expand into more of a core service provider role. From multi-tenant access and granular authorization set up in the Uplogix Control Center, Uplogix capabilities can be shared securely with internal users without giving up the keys to the kingdom. You’ll know that only the right people have the right access.

WAN Traffic Failover (WTF) lets Enterprise IT to provide their customers with SLAs by using the Uplogix out-of-band connection as a failover for network traffic. In the event of losing the primary connection, Uplogix can act as a backup cellular router by sharing its out-of-band cellular LTE connection with the local router/firewall/WAN accelerator.