Outsourcing helps organisations build a competitive edge, says Jack Mizzi, chief marketing and business development officer at BMIT Ltd.
What elements have enabled you to become a leader in your sector?
BMIT’s mission statement speaks about our passion in delivering top-notch IT services in order to “help our customers attain increased business agility through new breed ICT services.” This passion has enabled us to maintain consistent delivery of our service offerings as well as roll out various new services, win new customers and also grow together with many of our existing ones.
In order to ensure that our portfolio fully addresses our ever-changing customer needs, over the recent years, we have undergone a full transformation of our service offering. As a result, we have shifted from a traditional co-location and hosting provider to a fully-fledged IT solutions provider, with services not only including co-location and hosting, which services remain core to our business, but also a full suite of cloud enabled services as well as the ability to offer our customers managed services and solutions.
Whether we use internal resources, or partner with associated companies or some of the world’s largest IT providers, we are able to deliver a one-stop-shop to provide solutions which span across all customer IT requirements.
All businesses are becoming increasingly IT-based. However, a lot of companies do not have the resources to handle this transformation. What advantages does outsourcing to third parties offer?
Outsourcing is very often viewed mainly as a strategy for producing cost savings. However, by simply following a traditional cost-focused approach, countless companies may be missing opportunities to add value and gain further competitive advantage. Outsourcing should not focus solely on cost considerations – rather it should be concerned with building a competitive edge.
A key advantage is the ability for the business to focus on what it does best and let third parties handle certain operational aspects. Another advantage is that an organisation and its staff can increase their interactivity with other IT organisations, and therefore develop best-of-breed solutions. Through outsourcing, a business can also achieve enhanced efficiency, while credibility with stakeholders and regulators is further developed.
The decision to outsource should not be purely an economic consideration. The ability to react to changes in the business with timely delivery of quality services plays a major role in a company’s decision to outsource discrete business processes or services.
Do companies still see outsourcing as loss of control?
Some companies still consider outsourcing as a threat to their ability to control their IT. But in general, there is nowadays a better understanding of the value of letting a third party handle aspects of the IT delivery. This is resulting in an increasing number of organisations outsourcing their IT to varying degrees, with some totally handing over the operations of their IT to an external partner-company.
IT-as-a-service is one approach which facilitates and puts in context the value and potential of outsourcing and how to turn it into a key component of how IT teams deliver solutions to their organisation. This in turn facilitates the adoption of outsourcing within IT teams of organisations and businesses of all types.
What are the main services that you offer?
BMIT started off as a co-location and hosting provider, which services we continue to offer as part of our data centre services portfolio. We now operate two data centres in Malta and also have data centre presence in Italy and Germany, therefore allowing a high degree of flexibility to our customers.
Through these ISO 27001 and PCI-DSS certified data centres we offer a full suite of co-location services, ranging from basic co-location services to managed hosting services. Our customers have access to up to 40Gbps of internet connectivity via a private network linking our data centres in Malta, Italy and Germany. Additionally, we provide advanced protection and mitigation against malicious attacks on websites, also known as DDOS attacks, or distributed denial of service attacks.
A second category of services are cloud-based. Besides being the leading hosting and co-location provider in Malta, we also provide a range of public, on demand cloud services as well as private and hybrid cloud solutions as part of our portfolio.
Since such cloud services are hosted at our own data centres, and managed by us, we can provide assurances on data location and retention that can’t be offered by the bigger cloud services players.
Our managed IT services range was developed specifically to assist operators run their services more efficiently. In cases where the operator has its own IT team, our role is usually to supplement their efforts and assist them in their support function. Other operators opt to outsource all IT support to us, in which case our role is to ensure a round-the-clock upkeep of the systems, as well as provide advice on best-practice.
Data is the lifeblood of any company. In what ways do you help businesses address potential data losses?
Companies that outsource their data management needs can invest in only the services they’ll actually use, rather than spend money on additional equipment required for physical backup and recovery, some of which is hardly ever used.
We offer companies the possibility to choose from a range of services, depending on specific business requirements, including co-locating data in one or more of our data centres for additional security, as well as a simple and scalable cloud backup solution that sends copies of data from any computer to BMIT’s secure backup farm. Such services address the technical requirements of a holistic disaster recovery plan.
With regards to limiting risk exposure, what best practice advice do you offer your clients?
Our experience with dealing with such situations shows that one should never put all eggs in one basket. In this context this means that one should, as much as possible and feasible, have off-site backups of data. This can take several forms, ranging from having a cloud backup solution, up to have redundant backup and storage capability across different data centres. One need not break the bank to have a backup solution in place.
For example, we have backup plans which allow backing up to 50GB from the customer to one of our data centres for just €5 per month.
Any risk management shall be undertaken as part of a holistic plan which identifies the risk points and seeks to provide a solution towards addressing them or mitigate them as much as possible.
This article first appeared in the Zest supplement carried in The Sunday Times of Malta.