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Today we are going to tell you a little story and see if it rings true for your organization.  This is a story of a fictitious company named Contoso.  Although Contoso is the popular make believe company Microsoft has been so kind to share with us over the years, the parallels to your organization might be very real.  Let’s embark shall we?

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…Meanwhile, back at Contoso headquarters the business leadership team is looking to become more efficient while growing the business through various avenues.  One of those critical avenues is more streamlined and efficient IT processes that enable the business to be nimble and proactive, rather than reactive.  The Contoso IT department is comprised of talented individuals who have the depth and know how to help propel the business forward.

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Today, the talented IT professionals at Contoso spend 40-60% of their time performing administrative tasks using automation tools, such as System Center Configuration Manager and PowerShell, for things like:

• Monthly Microsoft Updates deployments
• Creating and managing Applications
• Managing drivers and driver updates
• Creating streamlined OS Deployment processes
• Updating Gold reference images
• Upgrading SCCM infrastructure
• Tweaking Task Sequences
• Windows 10 continuous deployment Branch servicing
• ..and much much more

The limited remainder of their time is used to focus on big picture infrastructure updates, digital transformation, streamlined automation, and forward thinking to drive the business objectives with purpose of becoming a business enabler rather than a cost center.

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However, the daily minutia of managing the administrative tasks makes this very challenging if not impossible for the talented IT professionals to focus on the business initiatives that would make the best use of their skills.  This leads to Contoso IT leadership requesting more headcount to offload the administrative tasks to allow the engineers to focus on the business.  Unfortunately, these requests were denied and Contoso IT needs to figure out how to do more with less.  This has been an upward trend for the some time.  The number of hats that the Contoso IT professional now wear is so tall that they topple off their heads.

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What our story shows is Contoso IT engineers that are grinding through the daily tasks at hand to keep the infrastructure and end point computing environment secure and stable and have little time left to focus on the requests coming down from the business.  What they really want to be doing is working hand in hand with the business to develop new ways to continue to exceed the business expectations and utilize technology, whether it be automation, moving workloads to the cloud to be more agile, or simply improving the overall end user experience to increase productivity and drive down support costs.

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If any of this rings true for you keep reading!

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So, how does Contoso solve this problem?  Managed Services of course!

Thousands of companies across the globe are turning to Managed Services providers to get out of the daily grind for their talented internal resources, freeing their time to focus on revenue generating projects.  With this new-found freedom, Contoso IT is pushing the boundaries of leading technology to empower the business to be more secure, mobile, agile, and profitable.

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With the right Managed Services provider, you can achieve:

• Predictable budget costs
• Greater savings
• Service Level Agreements (SLA) for guaranteed results
• “Best practices” approach to automation and administration
• Patch compliance and reporting to ensure you are protected when malware such as WannaCrypt release to the wild
• Quicker turnaround for administrative tasks
• A well-managed, up-to-date, and predictable environment
• A true partner to your organization who works with you to understand how you operate, applying years of experience to drive efficiency in your IT processes.

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To summarize, automation is changing the landscape of information technology as we know it, and IT is becoming more and more involved when directing the path of your business. Offloading remedial tasks to the right Managed Services Provider will free your time and allow you to focus on driving your company forward!