The Modern IT Partner

Hello and welcome the BCN Podcast, on this episode I have the pleasure of speaking with Darron Millar – Technical Solutions Director here at BCN. 

I’m Pete Filitz and I work with businesses in overcoming challenges and obstacles holding them back by leveraging the power of IT and technology for having a positive impact on their business. 

This podcast series is all about keeping you up to date with the trends we are seeing in the IT and business technology space. 

 We’re here to educate you on everything they need to know from a business technology perspective and provide a better understanding on how IT and technology can have a positive impact on your business.

 In this episode we are talking about how the role of the IT support partner or company has changed and what you should be looking for from your IT partner. 

 On this episode we're going to explain:

• The biggest mistakes companies are making when it comes to managing their IT and IT Strategy
• We’ll discus the potential benefits and challenges of moving your business to the cloud and we’ll share some real life examples of where that move has gone well, where it hasn't and why its so important working with the right partner.  
• We’ll touch on the processes we use for getting a better fundamental understanding if the business IT needs

We hope you enjoy it and find it useful! 

Thanks for listening!

Connect with us on LinkedIn or visit our website.

Transcript

Peter: 0:02

Hello and welcome to the BCN Podcast. I'm Peter Phillips and I work with businesses in helping them understand how IT and technology can better assist them with delivering on their business plans, stay ahead of the competition, and equip their staff with the necessary tools to be successful. This podcast series is all about keeping you up to date with the trends we're seeing in the IT and business technology workspace. We are here to educate you on everything that you need to know from a business technology perspective and provide a better understanding on how IT and technology can have a positive impact on your business. On this episode, we're talking about how the role of the IT support partner has changed and what you should be looking for from your IT support partner. We're going to explain the biggest mistakes that companies are making when it comes to managing their IT and their IT strategy. We'll discuss the potential challenges and benefits of moving your business to the cloud, and we'll share some real life examples of where that move has gone well and where it hasn't, and why it's so important to work with a right IT partner. I'm joined by Darren Miller, Technical Solutions Director Yarrett BCN. Darren, why don't you tell us a bit more about yourself?

SPEAKER_01: 1:16

So I've been in the MSP space now for around 20 years. So came from an electronics background, worked for Apple, and now in the MSP space in London for almost 20 years. And now I'm responsible for technical solutions. Everything from talking about solutions to designing the scope of the solutions and then delivering those solutions.

Peter: 1:40

Do you want to tell us a little bit how the role as the IT support company or IT partner in your eyes has changed over the years?

SPEAKER_01: 1:49

Well, I think the biggest thing, Pete, is sort of back in the day when I started, it was pretty much breakfix. So if a company had a problem with their IT, they would call someone, someone would fix it, and they charge them an hourly rate. In a way, it was in the interest of the IT company that things would break because they'd make more money, which wasn't really a model that made sense when you think back to it. So that's how it was in the beginning. And then slowly this term of the MSP, the managed service provider, evolved. Other terms like managed service came into it as well. And a managed service is really, you know, not just selling a service and forgetting about it, actually the ongoing management of it, supporting it, making sure it's running efficiently and fixing it when it breaks. So I think that's probably the biggest change. Things became more fixed price, and we are now at a model today where generally businesses will pay a fixed price for support, and therefore it's in both a client and our interest that things run smoothly and efficiently.

Peter: 2:53

I mean, it is, as you say, when you look back, a rather archaic way of working. I think, though, it's fair to say that business needs have also changed significantly with the rate at which technology has evolved. Businesses in yesteryears would see IT as more a necessary expense, whereas in today's world it's a key tool, a strategic part of the puzzle, so to say, for delivering on their business plans and objectives, which has essentially brought us, I think, closer to the clients we look after in the sense that we are very much more involved with the client's business and understanding the way in which they operate, the challenges in their market space, and obviously identifying inefficiencies within the business and the processes where technology can make a real difference. Tell us a little bit about your role that you also provide in supporting some of our key clients. You work quite closely with a few businesses running and managing their IT strategy. Can you elaborate a little more on that?

SPEAKER_01: 4:06

So that's a role I do with with some clients who who are some of our bigger SMEs, SMBs who don't have any IT. So they don't have like a senior IT leadership role within the team. So I do, you know, often been referred to as a virtual IT director, virtual CTO, virtual CIO type role. And I guess the thing with CMI is we we don't work in any particular vertical space. So we have quite a range of different clients, which I'm sure you've probably covered on other podcasts. But you know, one of my clients are a big oil company, for example, who have lots of oil interest throughout the world. So that brings the challenge of remote working, working in countries with not great comms, not great internet, the challenges of getting those customers back to the UK to access remote servers and things like that. So that sort of thing is always a challenge. Um, I work with these clients on IT roadmaps, security assessments, you know, absolutely everything you could think of. So all the stuff that's outside of just the normal breakfix IT managed service, more of a strategic role within the business.

Peter: 5:18

And I think it's fair to say that it doesn't really matter the size or the industry you're in these days, having some form of strategic leadership on the IT front is essential for any business or organization because the landscape is continuously evolving and changing at such a rapid pace. And you really need a plan that offers you some direction on how best to accommodate and move with the times.

SPEAKER_01: 5:47

It's important that clients see the value in that as well. You know, often one of the mistakes, and I'm sure we'll get on to that, that companies make is they see IT as a cost and therefore give it to someone in finance to manage, which doesn't always work because you you need to see the value in IT and what an external provider can bring, and you need to appreciate that value to get the best out of it.

Peter: 6:10

Yeah. With technology evolving as it has been, gone are the days where we simply rely on IT to store files and use email. It's now providing a crucial collaborative tool to keep teams that are distributed across multiple time zones or locations together and work creatively on delivering products and projects for their businesses. And obviously the power of automation, right? It's all about working smarter, not necessarily harder. I know some managers hate that phrase, but there are only so many hours in the day, only so many people you can employ. And if you can reduce business costs and improve efficiencies by harnessing the power of technology, then you know why wouldn't you?

SPEAKER_01: 6:57

And I guess that that's where this term modern workplace comes in, which seems to be a bit of a buzzword at the moment. You know, it's creating that modern workplace, which will create a more agile work environment for everyone. As we know, after the pandemic, most companies now have sort of hybrid working, and it's all about creating that same user experience no matter where they are, and ideally no matter what device they're connecting from.

Peter: 7:23

Absolutely. And we can add, you know, securely, as that's again such a crucial topic that we've touched on, I think every podcast we've done to date, it is one of those challenges that I don't think will ever go away and it is continuously evolving. So tell me, Darren, obviously you've been in the industry for a while, you've worked with different businesses of different shapes, sizes, and industries. Can you tell me where you've seen businesses often go wrong? I know you touched on on the fact that some businesses see IT as a necessary expense. Where are we seeing businesses going wrong on the IT front?

SPEAKER_01: 8:02

I think probably just not really understanding, you know, for example, coming to us and saying, I want to move everything to the cloud, but not actually understanding what that means or understanding every aspect of their business or how their users work, or not getting professional advice. You know, making the decision in-house and and not having all the facts. You know, moving to the cloud is quite a big one because we often get this, and we we always smile when we get a client to say, right, I want to move everything to the cloud, because we know it's never as easy as that. Obviously, one of the big changes in the industry is the adoption of the cloud. So there was pretty much no cloud 20 years ago, and then Microsoft came up with this great idea that they were gonna move email into the cloud, and everyone was really scared and said, I'm not doing it. But now we have probably about 95% of our clients' email in the cloud in Microsoft 365. And I guess going forward, we will be there with servers one day as well. The cloud isn't for everyone, but there will be certain aspects of every business where cloud is a good idea. It's secure, it's a no-brainer, it's a practical decision to move, and email's an obvious one. There's no real reason not to have email in the cloud in this day and age.

Peter: 9:21

No, absolutely. And I think you touched on it there. A lot of businesses have this misconception that moving from servers on-premise or infrastructure within private data centers to public cloud environments is a simple lift and shift exercise, but it's certainly not. You know, at the end of the day, these platforms, especially focusing on the Microsoft 365 stack of services, are productivity suites, blank platforms that Microsoft essentially gives you to configure and set up in accordance with your business policies, processes, and best practices. And that's where often companies go wrong, is that they underestimate the amount of time, effort, and work involved because it does usually bring some change with it. And if they don't change, it's putting a a a square peg in a round hole. They're not really going to leverage the full functionality and key benefits of these cloud environments. So I know from my personal experience in speaking with customers, so often we're called in because they've made the move to the cloud, or so they thought they did, and they've bought into this service, but they're only using a fraction of the functionality or the features that are there. And it's because they were really ill-advised. They they didn't seek the necessary advice on how best to plan it. I know from even speaking to you and your team, that's often the case, mopping up the mess that has transpired because customers have made the move purely based or driven by cost and not really undergone the necessary due diligence.

SPEAKER_01: 11:03

And and that's key, Pete, because going in and auditing and trying to prepare a business for a move to the cloud is really quite an intense audit. There's always something that we forget or we we haven't found or the client hasn't made us aware of that's hiding on a service somewhere. I don't know, there might be like a door access system or something that we've missed. Or yes, there's always something there. And as I say, the cloud isn't always the answer, but it's becoming more and more of the norm for us to move our clients into some sort of cloud just because of all the other benefits of it. Just look at the cost of power and cooling and everything these days. That's just going up and up. The whole modern workplace thing is much easier when everything's centralized and in the cloud, and working from anywhere in the hybrid working thing certainly helps. And people are downsizing offices, they don't want expensive comms room and all that sort of thing as well. So, yes, there's a lot to consider. We're having discussions with clients where they've come to the end of their warranties on their on-prem equipment. We have to have that discussion with them, and we will analyze how they're using it and how they work as a business and decide whether we can move that into the cloud. And in some cases, we can't. So we just have to refresh the hardware.

Peter: 12:18

Yeah, I mean, that's where the cloud readiness assessment comes in. I know that you and the team have come up with, which takes a an in-depth look at the products and services that they're running on site and analysing it and assessing it really the viability for moving that into the cloud. So speak to your IT partner that you're working with if you are considering making that move, because it's so important you do that due diligence ahead of any big change, otherwise the implications for trying to rectify it retrospectively is costly and and massively disruptive to the business. We've seen that so many times in the past. So, Darren, uh it's always good to hear some real-world examples. Do you got any stories that you can share with us uh where either businesses have seen the success in in making the change and and the tangible benefits, or where things went horribly wrong? It's always good to learn from these things going forward.

SPEAKER_01: 13:20

Well, obviously nothing we proposed has gone horribly wrong, but um we've probably taken on some clients that have been ill-advised or find themselves on the wrong platform or doing the wrong thing. We can probably talk about the solution we put in for a large uh recruitment company, specifically around the virtual desktop thing, Pete, which I know you did a previous podcast on, which is pretty much having a Windows desktop in the cloud. We had one of our clients who had a hosted system out in the States, which was just really overkill for what they needed. They had a full virtual desktop system, but all they needed was email and some file sharing facilities, and they had to run one application. So we were able to really simplify that, save them a significant amount of money and migrate everything into SharePoint. I say that again, you know, it's not for everyone. We had to do a lot of work to prepare their data to move it to SharePoint. So not getting too technical, but you you can't just pick up a whole lot of data from a server and chuck it into SharePoint and expect it to work because there's a lot of differences to that. But in some instances it does, and in this particular instance, it it was fine for what they needed to do. So we did a sort of SharePoint Teams project for them, which was really successful. The one application they needed to use, we spun up in in Azure using some virtual servers and gave the the small team that needed access to that access via remote services. So yeah, that was quite a successful one. They were certainly overpaying for a service that they, you know, and you mentioned this earlier, they were using sort of 10, 20% of.

Peter: 15:02

Yeah, it's important that there is a close-knit relationship between the IT partner and the business for fully understanding the business processes, uh, the policies, the needs and the wants, so that they can make an informed recommendation on which route to go. Because so often we see that IT providers out there are shoehorning solutions and technologies that they feel comfortable with and supporting rather than leading with products and services that are actually best suited for their clients' needs. And I think that goes back to our approach when onboarding new clients, it's it's the Impact 360 process that we've developed as a business, which really forms three parts. It's the stakeholder engagement for understanding the business strategy and and business plan, understanding the ambitions and the goals that the leadership team have set, engaging with the staff in understanding how they work, what they need, what's not working, and where they can make improvements, and then really doing that deep dive of the systems that they're using at the moment for understanding where they are and where they want to be and taking that information gleaned from all three of those exercises, it really gives us the ability to direct and work with the client in putting them on that journey for moving their business forward.

SPEAKER_01: 16:35

As you say, Pete, it's so important that we're aligned with the business and we understand about the business and what their goals are and what it is they want to achieve. Can't underestimate how important it is we spend as much time as possible getting to know them, getting to know their users, and getting to know their systems and how they work. I'm always unhappy when you bring us a new client and immediately we've got to do a project. And sometimes that happens, but it's never ideal for us because we don't really understand the client in depth, which is really what you need to do to deliver a successful project. Um, we've realized over the years how crucial that part of it is to selling any solution. So we have some dedicated pre-sales guys who work to advise clients and to go through all the due diligence and really try and understand systems and what solution is best for the clients going forward.

Peter: 17:29

Darren, obviously, drawing on the many years of illustrious experience you've gleaned from your career, um, without giving your age away, give us, in your opinion, your top three tips organizations should be doing.

SPEAKER_01: 17:45

I think I mean security has got to be a big topic of conversation. So really secure your system. So starting at your core with obvious things like firewalls and two-factor authentication on anything you access. I think clients now have to adopt those strategies and they're becoming the norm, right? So users got annoyed when we started rolling all of this out. Unfortunately, there's a whole lot of systems that don't talk to one particular TFA provider. So we find ourselves with multiple two-factor authentication applications on our phone, and it's a real pain, but it's better than the alternative. So definitely focus on securing your core systems and really using a sort of zero trust type approach to security principles. So, you know, only trust your users that are continually authenticated and authorized before they get access to your systems or your data. So that part of security and then protecting the endpoint is also really important. You know, training your users regularly, doing phishing training, sending phishing simulations to your users, because as we know, that's where most of the attacks will come from, from your users clicking on emails. I guess from a productivity perspective, you know, consider the modern workplace stuff. There's a lot of businesses out there that have made major inroads into changing the way they work. It becomes a better, more efficient and enjoyable place to work as an employee when you have efficient and agile systems in place. It just makes life so much easier when you can shoot home, pick up your kids, and open your laptop and carry on working just like you're in the office. Consider that modern workplace thing and adopt all the new technologies that are out there.

Peter: 19:35

Thanks for joining us on today's podcast. If you want to find out more about us, the services, and the products that we provide, please feel free to visit our website www.bcn.co.uk. There you'll find a wealth of information and knowledge around the products and services that can help you and your business move forward. We look forward to hearing from you, and please, if you have any further questions, or if you'd like to know more about the products and services we discuss on this series, don't hesitate to get in touch. Thanks for tuning in and don't forget to subscribe.