By Kent Christensen / 28 Sep 2023 / Topics: As a service Cloud Modern infrastructure IT optimization
Working with clients, we’re finding that an as-a-service approach has become a massively powerful growth engine. It’s helping them build resilience, gain peace of mind during turbulent times and reallocate resources toward innovation.
How could your company benefit? Let's explore the top signs that indicate as-a-service solutions might be exactly what your organization needs to drive focused growth.
Is your company considering freeing up capital or reducing upfront expenses? The as-a-service model provides a compelling alternative to traditional capital investments. Instead of purchasing hardware, software licenses or infrastructure outright, you can subscribe to the services you need. This shift from a capital expenditure (CapEx) to an operational expenditure (OpEx) model is significantly alleviating the financial burden on the clients we work with, offering a more efficient way to access critical resources.
Many of our clients view the shift from CapEx to OpEx as a strategic reallocation play. It enables you to invest in areas that drive growth and innovation, rather than tying up capital in fixed assets. Whether it's Network as a Service (NaaS), Storage as a Service (STaaS), SaaS applications, or other cloud-based services, as-a-service solutions facilitate this shift extremely well.
It’s more difficult than ever to forecast and budget the correct amount of infrastructure in a rapidly changing world. Most organizations overbuy — or under then overbuy a premium to align — what they actually need over a long period of time. Cloud offers the agility to simply pay for what you use when you use it. However, cloud for applications that are powering many organizations (virtual machines, databases, etc.) can be very expensive and difficult to transition to. Consuming Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) gives you the agility of a flexible pay-as-you-go model for what you use, without the risk and complexity of moving those applications to a new environment that was not designed for most legacy applications.
Uncertainty in business and the cloud is a big source of anxiety for IT leaders right now. As a service can help reduce risk by providing a reliable and adaptable infrastructure. With as a service, you can easily adjust resources to match fluctuations in your business environment. This ensures that your operations remain stable even in fluctuating times without the risk of overcommitting to resources — it also offers the flexibility to scale resources up or down as needed.
This liquidity can be a lifeline in challenging market conditions, ensuring your company's resilience and agility. Whether it's scaling up your network infrastructure, deploying additional software licenses, or expanding your cloud computing capabilities, as a service helps you do that rapidly (and without the constraints of traditional procurement processes). This agility means you can capitalize on market upswings. You can adapt to evolving customer demands. And you can remain competitive even in challenging times.
Mergers, acquisitions, and other significant business transformations are pivotal moments that can shape the future of your organization. They present both opportunities and challenges, and how you manage these changes determines your success.
As-a-service solutions support our clients during these critical phases of their business journeys. Simplifying integration is one major benefit of this approach; Merging two distinct organizations or integrating new entities into existing structure is a complex process, and as-a-service offerings provide a unified, adaptable framework for IT needs, lifting the burden of costly hardware procurements, and seamlessly connecting and merging IT resources. Another big benefit of an as-a-service approach is that it helps conserve capital and provides predictability during a period of transition when financial stability is so important.
The clients we’re working with are seeing financial flexibility, predictable monthly payments and a cost-effective way to modernize and scale. Insight’s partnership with leading storage providers and comprehensive expertise in end-to-end IT solutions allows us to deliver cost-effective, agile infrastructure to support growing clients.
Several of Insight’s partners provide as-a-service offerings spanning on-premises and hybrid cloud environments. Clients can subscribe for the amount of storage and compute hardware required, and benefit from on-premises cloud consumption services as well as bursting capabilities to public cloud.
When you combine exceptional storage, compute and managed services expertise — with a full portfolio of add-on services — you get a smarter way to approach cloud strategies, workload migrations, workload assessments and much more.
Practice Director
Kent leans on more than 20 years of industry experience to help clients with storage consolidation, virtualization, and cloud strategies that drive outcomes. Previously holding IT management and software engineering positions, Kent also researches, recommends, and integrates technologies and services into Insight's expanding portfolio of offerings.
