Meet Fast-Changing Business Demands with IT Staff Augmentation
As business and educational leaders fight to keep their organizations surviving and thriving, their IT teams struggle to keep pace with the speed of change. At the same time, you need the flexibility to scale your people resources to meet fast-changing business demands.
IT staff augmentation offers a flexible way to help organizations meet today’s fast-changing resource demands, while acquiring the agility to meet challenges that lie ahead.
Value of IT staff augmentation
IT staff augmentation is an ideal short-term solution that gives you the agility needed to quickly scale resources as you need—or don’t need—them. Contracts are typically minimal and, with simple cost structures, you can offset the costs of hiring more permanent employees with little to no impact on your organization. For example, you can:
- Quickly acquire needed or specialized skills, such as engineers certified in specific technologies.
- Fill unexpected absences or shortages due to illness/quarantine, maternity/paternity leaves, sabbaticals, vacations, resignations/terminations, or other events.
- Avoid the costs of and take the time needed to recruit and hire the right employee.
- Overcome hiring freezes and other restrictions.
Simply put, it’s a flexible, short-term solution to fast-changing IT resource issues. Consider the following use cases:
- Scaling a remote workforce – While some organizations were already accustomed to certain coworkers such as salespeople working remotely, this year everything changed Organizations needed to quickly convert most, if not all, of their employees to a remote workforce, which required them to focus on making secure, always-on connections into the network via firewalls and VPNs.
- Scale for mobility– Many organizations already had their infrastructure locked down but didn’t have mobile technologies in place. These organizations had to quickly scale up a mobile workforce by issuing laptops and securely extending desktops and services to their newly remote employees.
- Meet compliance initiatives – Some companies needed to focus on locking down their entire environment to meet some compliance initiative, such as PCI or GDRP.
- Meet industry-specific business demands – Some sectors needed to immediately accommodate spikes in their businesses, putting added pressure on already extended IT teams. For example:
- Healthcare organizations needed to set up field hospitals to accommodate the surge in the sick.
- Retailers needed to expand their online and social presence to keep their doors open.
- Educational organizations had to quickly adapt and deliver their curricula via online and distance learning.
- Manufacturers had to rework production lines and extend and develop supply chains to meet increased demand.
- Financial services firms and banks needed to manage the uptick in loans and processing as a result of the CARES Act.
- Accommodate employees struggling with childcare and educational responsibilities – In addition to being sent home to work, many employees struggled to balance childcare and educational responsibilities as their kids were also sent home to learn. Some parents reported having to spend 5 hours per day per child on educational activities, taking significant time away from their work.
Logicalis: Your IT staff augmentation expert
Trust Logicalis to meet your short-term IT staff needs as your people resources become depleted. Our experienced, senior-level engineers can quickly deploy on site, remotely, or in combination for anywhere from two weeks to 6 months or more on a full- or part-time basis. They’ll fill critical IT roles right away, such as:
- Stepping into key or leadership roles on a day-to-day basis;
- Maintaining specific technologies, such as voice, data center, LAN/WAN, backup, etc.;
- Evaluating technologies or partners; and
- Performing backups, simple MACs, and general IT troubleshooting.
Our engineering professionals possess extensive knowledge on many technologies, thrive in challenging and changing environments, quickly blend into your environment, and will gracefully exit when needed.
For even more flexibility, Logicalis offers Virtual IT, a pre-paid block of remote engineering hours for ad hoc, general consulting and service tickets for specified technologies.
To learn more about how we can help you fill short-term, temporary IT needs, click here or call us at 888-550-8324.
Jeremy Farmer is Senior Director, Technical Sales at Logicalis. Along with being a Cisco CCIE assisting Logicalis customers design and deploy complex networks, he manages Logicalis’ East region of Solution Architects. His team focuses on technologies for networking, collaboration, security and data center.