IoT Managed Services Role in the Enterprise IoT Evolution

  Managed IT Services is ready to help companies in various ways, from building and managing the entire network to helping them tackle specific projects, such as the move to 3G extinction.

IoT is no longer just the domain of the first users. It also means that multiple companies can undertake IoT implementations without fully understanding what lies ahead. Many are faced with decisions about how to integrate IoT architectures into their existing network environments, how to continue managing those architectures, the devices that connect to them and the applications that run them.

The IT staff of companies have faced many similar decisions in the past when implementing new technologies, deciding whether they want to be involved in creating or managing solutions or asking for help from managed service providers. who can do anything for them? MSPs can help you with everything related to planning, purchasing hardware and software, building architectures and managing your networks and services over the long term.

MSPs have been important business partners for decades, helping them through the evolution of connectivity, security and cloud computing technologies. The latest evolution that companies are looking for MSP support is the evolution of IoT.

"There has been a change in philosophy from the belief that IoT is as simple as getting a data plan and connecting hardware," said Chris Baird, CEO of OptConnect, a communications company. Kaysville, Utah, which provided managed services. for many years and officially launched an offer of IoT managed services at the recent IoT World Conference and Expo 2019 in Santa Clara, California. "If you think about how large the IoT is for businesses and everything they need to start, it can be difficult for many companies to bring together different parts of the entire IoT solution."

The IoT managed services the market is growing rapidly, according to Persistence Market Research. The market, which includes services such as infrastructure management, network management, device management, security management, and data management, by the way, will be worth over $ 94 billion by 2026, with a compound annual growth rate of over 20% between 2018 and 2026, an estimated PMR 2018 study.

Different Needs

Ultimately, there are many reasons why a company can choose a managed IoT service provider. The most obvious is that they lack the knowledge and experience to do the job effectively and profitably on their own.

Steve Garrett, OptConnect product manager said that with a growing interest in IoT, many companies are just starting to explore it "are completely ignorant and have no idea how to connect their equipment." These are the companies that are likely to need a fully managed service solution, covering everything from sensor hardware to connectivity, security, network monitoring and potentially more.

Other companies, said Garrett, "know the IoT and are trying to rebuild it. They could try to make the decision to create or buy and realize that there is simply too much choice. An MSP can help a company at this point. , managing parts of the IoT construction or managing aspects of the IoT architecture that the company decides not to manage on its own.

Garrett said companies that are very knowledgeable about IoT and advanced enough in their IoT travel, however, may find themselves forced to migrate a self-managed architecture to a third-party managed service. "We have customers who have distributed from 4,000 to 5,000 cell sites, who are overwhelmed and have learned that they can no longer grow their business. We have passed many of these portfolios and transferred them to our services."

For some companies, the need for managed IoT services may not be due to a lack of knowledge, but to more practical Managed Business Services, such as a lack of budget to distribute IoT equipment. These companies may find it more advantageous to pay the IoT as current operating expenses than to allocate a much larger budget for both the initial capital expenditures involved in the distribution of the IoT.

But not all companies may need a "nut soup" Managed Service Support, as Garrett described. Some companies may simply not have enough team members with specific skills to manage an aspect of IoT management, such as connectivity, security, data analysis or device management. In these cases, an MSP can manage this sore spot instead of everything. For example, OptConnect, which focuses largely on cellular technology for IoT connectivity can focus on managing a company's connections to different cellular providers without being more deeply involved in the company's internal IoT architecture if that's all that's needed,