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Modern IT Service Management is Transforming Managed Services. Heres how. (Part 1)
2025-11-28 19:58:47| The Webmail Blog
Modern IT Service Management is Transforming Managed Services. Heres how. (Part 1) caro2698 Fri, 11/28/2025 - 12:58 Cloud Insights Modern IT Service Management is Transforming Managed Services - Part 1 December 4, 2025 by Jason Rinehart, Sr Product Architect, Rackspace Technology Link Copied! Recent Posts Modern IT Service Management is Transforming Managed Services - Part 1 December 4th, 2025 How Kiro AI Agents Accelerate Development from Modernization to Cloud Migration Analysis December 1st, 2025 Is Your AI Operation Achieving Long-Term, Sustainable Growth? November 25th, 2025 Strengthening Healthcare Operations Through Cyber Resilience November 24th, 2025 The Hidden Complexity of Microsoft 365 Copilot and How to Get Ready for It November 19th, 2025 Related Posts Cloud Insights Modern IT Service Management is Transforming Managed Services - Part 1 December 4th, 2025 AI Insights How Kiro AI Agents Accelerate Development from Modernization to Cloud Migration Analysis December 1st, 2025 AI Insights Is Your AI Operation Achieving Long-Term, Sustainable Growth? November 25th, 2025 Cloud Insights Strengthening Healthcare Operations Through Cyber Resilience November 24th, 2025 Cloud Insights, Products The Hidden Complexity of Microsoft 365 Copilot and How to Get Ready for It November 19th, 2025 Is your organization struggling with outdated IT? Modernizing with service management can be a gamechanger. This is part one in a two-part series on modern service management. Lets be honest: the way we deliver IT services has changed more in the past five years than in the previous two decades. If youre still relying on old-school, infrastructure-heavy models, youre probably feeling the pressure to keep up. Ive spent over 20 years in the trenches building, scaling and reinventing managed services for organizations of all sizes. What Ive learned is simple: embracing modern service management (MSM) isnt just a technical upgrade for IT; its a mindset shift that you must experience if you want to unlock real business value. Lets dig into what MSM means, why it matters and how you can start applying the principles right now. Why shift to modern service management? Remember the days when IT was the gatekeeper, controlling every server and every process? Those days are gone. Today, business units can spin up cloud services with a credit card. And ITs role is evolving rapidly. Traditional IT service management (ITSM) frameworks built for on-premises, manual environments cant keep up with the speed and flexibility that modern organizations demand. MSM flips the script. Instead of just keeping the lights on, IT becomes a strategic partner, driving agility, innovation and outcomes that matter to your business. Thought starter: Ask yourself: Is our IT team adding real value or just maintaining the status quo? Where could automation free up your people to focus on what really matters? Whats different about MSM design principles? Customer value first: Every activity should create business value. If it doesnt, why are you still doing it? At Rackspace Technology, we put automation, self-service and rapid deployment front and center. We call it the Fanatical Experience. Design for resilience: Failure happens. MSM says to plan for it, recover fast and keep moving. Its about building systems that bounce back, not just systems that never break. Zero-touch automation: The less manual intervention, the better. Automation isnt just a buzzword; its the engine of speed, quality and predictability. Idea to try: Map out your top five manual processes. How many could be automated or streamlined? What would that free up for your team? Does your organization have the skill to automate the processes? What would you do if it didnt? Turning MSM principles into action the modern way Lets get practical. Heres how Ive seen MSM principles come to life in organizations and how you can aim for the same results. Business relationship management Old approach: IT builds custom solutions in a vacuum, hoping theyll fit a business need. Modern approach: IT and business units work as partners, co-creating services that move the needle. At Rackspace, we form cross-functional teams with organizations and have seen their public cloud adoption increase within the first year. Quick win: Set up regular service design sessions with business stakeholders and trusted advisors, like Rackspace. Make them part of your process, not just the end user or a procurement division. Capacity management Old approach: Guesswork and manual provisioning often led to wasted resources. Modern approach: Use cloud-native tools to scale up or down in real time. Automated monitoring keeps costs in check and resources optimized. Quick win: Review your cloud usage monthly. Are you paying for capacity you dont need? Are you unsure where to even begin? We have solutions to help. Availability and continuity Old approach: Redundancy and manual recovery plans were the norm. Modern approach: Built-in resiliency and automated failover are now standard. In my experience, automating deployments cuts manual workloads by 40% and boosts uptime. Quick win: Automate your failover testing. Document your recovery steps as code, not just in a binder. Information security and compliance Old approach: Security was all about networks and manual audits. Modern approach: Focus has shifted to identity and data, with proactive, automated controls. Cloud-native compliance tools make audits less painful and more effective. Quick win: Automate compliance checks. Shift your security focus to identity management. Financial management Old approach: Incur huge, centralized budgets and little transparency. Modern approach: Move to usage-based, opex-focused financial models. Cloud platforms give you real-time financial data. Use it. Quick win: Empower product owners to manage their own budgets. Use cloud cost management tools to track and optimize spending. Service level and lifecycle management Old approach: Custom SLAs and slow product-focused iterations. Modern approach: Standardized SLAs focused on user experience (XLAs) and agile, continuously optimized services. Quick win: Define experience-level agreements that measure what users care about. Iterate quickly. Improve often. Find what works. Discard what doesnt. Service operations reimagined Heres where things get exciting. MSM isnt just about delivery. Its about how you operate day-to-day. Self-service and automation: Ditch the manual ticketing. Give users self-service portals and automate the workflows behind them. Automated configuration and change management: Use automated discovery and service mapping. Build continuous delivery pipelines with built-in controls. Unified cloud management: Manage everything from a single platform. Break down silos and eliminate manual tasks. Ideas to spark change Launch a self-service portal for common IT requests. Use infrastructure as code for configuration management. Build CI/CD pipelines for every release. Management and support capabilities Dynamic service catalogs: Offer pre-approved, business-aligned services that users can provision on demand. Real-time monitoring and remediation: Monitor at the service level and automate fixes for common issues. Process automation: Automate end-to-end across IT functions to accelerate delivery and reduce errors. Ideas to implement Curate a service catalog with standardized offerings. Integrate monitoring tools that trigger automated fixes. Assign champions to drive automation across the organization. Wrapping up: lay the groundwork for intelligent operations MSM may seem like a merely a trend. But its the foundation for delivering managed services that are agile, resilient and truly aligned with your business goals. By embracing MSM principles and leveraging cloud-native capabilities, you can brak free from legacy constraints and open the window of opportunity to innovation and growth. Final questions to consider Where could automation make the biggest impact in your organization? How can IT and business units collaborate more closely? What metrics reflect the value your services deliver? Are you making the most of cloud-native tools for security, compliance and cost management? Whats next? In part two, I share insight on how AI and intelligent operations are taking IT service management to the next level. Stay tuned to discover how to make your IT operation predictive, proactive and continuously improving. Learn more about our managed cloud services. Tags: Cloud Insights
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Is Your AI Operation Achieving Long-Term, Sustainable Growth?
2025-11-25 17:08:21| The Webmail Blog
Is Your AI Operation Achieving Long-Term, Sustainable Growth? caro2698 Tue, 11/25/2025 - 10:08 AI Insights Is Your AI Operation Achieving Long-Term, Sustainable Growth? November 25, 2025 by Ben Blanquera, VP of Technology and Sustainability, Rackspace Technology Link Copied! Recent Posts Is Your AI Operation Achieving Long-Term, Sustainable Growth? November 25th, 2025 Strengthening Healthcare Operations Through Cyber Resilience November 24th, 2025 The Hidden Complexity of Microsoft 365 Copilot and How to Get Ready for It November 19th, 2025 The Hidden Complexity of Microsoft 365 Copilot and How to Get Ready for It November 19th, 2025 Overcoming Cloud Adoption Challenges in Healthcare November 18th, 2025 Related Posts AI Insights Is Your AI Operation Achieving Long-Term, Sustainable Growth? November 25th, 2025 Cloud Insights Strengthening Healthcare Operations Through Cyber Resilience November 24th, 2025 Cloud Insights, Products The Hidden Complexity of Microsoft 365 Copilot and How to Get Ready for It November 19th, 2025 Cloud Insights, Products The Hidden Complexity of Microsoft 365 Copilot and How to Get Ready for It November 19th, 2025 Cloud Insights Overcoming Cloud Adoption Challenges in Healthcare November 18th, 2025 Should you move beyond isolated AI projects and create a cohesive, strategic portfolio to help achieve long-term AI growth? Discover what our expert thinks. We are all witnesses to the reimagining of an industry cycle. AI is reshaping how to create value and how to build a competitive advantage. However, many organizations are engaged in todays transformational period with short-term thinking. Many are tackling individual AI tasks while overlooking their long-term sustainability consequences. This narrow approach speaks to a reality that was discovered in our recent global report, The AI Acceleration Gap: Why Some Enterprises Are Surging Ahead. According to the report, AI investments have expanded 250% from $2.5 million to $8.7 million per organization. However, only 13% of the 1,400 IT decision-makers we surveyed are seeing measurable returns. This is in direct contrast to the 64% who said theyve achieved substantial benefits from AI. This group of AI Leaders are three times more likely to successfully scale deployments. Whats causing this disparity? For starters, AI Leaders are tackling AI investments like a diversified financial portfolio. This includes balancing financial returns with operational resilience and ethical responsibility. They believe this approach gives them a competitive advantage, an opportunity to achieve long-term growth and the ability to avoid the accumulation of unsustainable technical debt. Sustainable portfolio thinking is critical today In our AI-driven world, entire industries are being reimagined. The traditional move-fast-and-break-things approach to building is no longer viable. Its likely the organizations that dominate the next decade will be those that use portfolio thinking to build operationally resilient, economically viable and ethically sound AI within a disciplined framework. Portfolio thinking widens your field of view. Instead of focusing narrowly on individual wins, it helps you confront the broader questions that shape sustainable AI, such as: Operational capabilities: What should we create to sustain our AI systems over the long term? AI investments: How can we create compounding economic value in the face of escalating costs? Stakeholder trust: How can we ensure our AI investments strengthen trust? Amazon offers a clear example of how a portfolio-driven strategy creates sustainable transformation. At the start of the internet era, the company developed complementary capabilities across multiple dimensions rather than pursue disconnected e-commerce tasks. Three layers in a sustainable investment framework How can your organization evolve from an isolated AI approach to a disciplined strategy? At Rackspace, weve seen that sustainable portfolios apply investments across three layers to reinforce operational, economic and ethical sustainability the foundation layer, the growth layer and the innovation layer. Foundation layer: building a sustainable bedrock (50% to 60% allocation) A strong AI portfolio has a set of rule-based, deterministic applications. The goal is to achieve economic value within six to 12 months while building infrastructure and achieving ethical transparency. This helps establish the governance framework, data pipelines and organizational ability to help enable sustainable scaling. Foundation investments should employ specific integrated sustainability filters, including: Economic: Demonstrate ROI within 18 months Operational: Employ existing skills while building AI capabilities Ethical: Strengthen stakeholder trust with transparent decision logic Growth layer: building a sustainable competitive advantage (30% to 40% allocation) Growth layer investments are advanced agentic AI applications that operate with autonomy. They make decisions within defined parameters to create operational excellence, economic value, and ethical governance capabilities. A good example of creating economic efficiency while achieving operational scale and maintaining ethical customer service standards is Bank of Americas virtual assistant. It has facilitated over three billion customer interactions, with more than 98% of users finding the information they were looking for. Growth investments require advanced sustainability integration, including: Restricted access: for operational security Fail-safe defaults: to protect performance and trust Logging: to capture operational health, economic impact and ethical decision making Innovation layer: securing a sustainable future advantage (10% to 15% allocation) Innovation investments are strategic bets on fully autonomous agentic AI systems. They are designed to create a competitive advantage that is both transformational and sustainable. The investments have the potential for achieving a long-term competitive advantage. However, they may require capital and sophisticated multidimensional risk management. A good example is DHL's Resilience360 platform. It utilizes AI-powered analytics and machine learning to help over 13,000 users worldwide predict and mitigate disruptions in their supply chains. Portfolio maturity to drive strategic allocation When applying the portfolio approach to AI strategy, decision makers should adjust their portfolio allocation according to their sustainability maturity, for example: Sustainability beginners (70% foundation, 25% growth, 5% innovation): Build integrated operational, economic and ethical capabilities via high-impact applications while also establishing governance frameworks. Sustainability adopters (50% foundation, 40% growth, 10% innovation): After launching controlled experiments with autonomous systems, leverage established infrastructure to deploy sophisticated applications. Sustainability leaders (40% foundation, 45% growth, 15% innovation): Balance market leadership with operational excellence via autonomous systems. This is where the AI Leaders in our study operate. They have achieved the Holy Grail: running projects more sustainably and more strategically. This level can help companies sidestep normal pitfalls, such as over-investing in sophisticated applications before prioritizing short-term economic gains over operational resilience, establishing sustainable foundations or deploying AI without considering long-term ethical implications. The sustainable, competitive imperative How large is the opportunity for establishing sustainable AI portfolios? Its shrinking every day. But businesses that develop sustainability-driven AI strategies have the potential to lead the pack in their marketplace. We predict that the future will be led by AI leaders who understand that we are deploying new technologies while rebuilding entire industries on sustainable foundations. By balancing operational resilience, economic returns and ethical responsibility, leaders who embrace the integrated approach will be well positioned to define the AI revolution and AIs long-term sustainability. Download the Rackspace report, The AI Acceleration Gap: Why Some Enterprises Are Surging Aead. Tags: AI AI Insights
Category: Telecommunications
Strengthening Healthcare Operations Through Cyber Resilience
2025-11-21 17:21:24| The Webmail Blog
Strengthening Healthcare Operations Through Cyber Resilience caro2698 Fri, 11/21/2025 - 10:21 Cloud Insights Strengthening Healthcare Operations Through Cyber Resilience November 24, 2025 by Rich Fletcher, Global Marketing Director Healthcare, Rackspace Technology Link Copied! Recent Posts Strengthening Healthcare Operations Through Cyber Resilience November 24th, 2025 The Hidden Complexity of Microsoft 365 Copilot and How to Get Ready for It November 19th, 2025 The Hidden Complexity of Microsoft 365 Copilot and How to Get Ready for It November 19th, 2025 Overcoming Cloud Adoption Challenges in Healthcare November 18th, 2025 Why Azure Arc Is Essential for Hybrid Success November 17th, 2025 Related Posts Cloud Insights Strengthening Healthcare Operations Through Cyber Resilience November 24th, 2025 Cloud Insights, Products The Hidden Complexity of Microsoft 365 Copilot and How to Get Ready for It November 19th, 2025 Cloud Insights, Products The Hidden Complexity of Microsoft 365 Copilot and How to Get Ready for It November 19th, 2025 Cloud Insights Overcoming Cloud Adoption Challenges in Healthcare November 18th, 2025 Cloud Insights, Products Why Azure Arc Is Essential for Hybrid Success November 17th, 2025 Cyber resilience has become a defining capability in healthcare. Learn how resilient infrastructure protects data, sustains operations nd preserves patient trust amid rising cyber threats. The new foundation for healthcare stability Healthcare depends on trust. Every clinical workflow, every care decision and every patient interaction relies on systems that must stay available and secure. As your organization adopts more digital platforms, from EHRs and clinical imaging systems to connected medical devices and patient engagement tools, the stakes rise. That reality became clear in 2024 when more than 276 million patient records were exposed, showing how modern threats can overwhelm traditional security programs. You already know cybersecurity is essential, but the challenge has shifted. Today, the question isnt whether you prevent every attack. Its whether your clinical operations continue when something goes wrong. Cyber resilience provides that capability. It gives you the operational strength to anticipate disruption, withstand impact and recover with confidence while protecting patient data and maintaining trust. Moving beyond compliance to operational resilience Many healthcare security programs were designed around compliance reporting and regulatory requirements. Compliance still matters, but the threat landscape demands a broader, operational model. You need an approach that connects security, continuity and patient safety into one coordinated strategy. Thats the purpose of our new white paper, Strengthening Healthcare Operations Through Cyber Resilience. It breaks down the four pillars that help you build a stronger foundation: 1. Business impact analysis Understand which systems and processes are essential to patient care, revenue and daily operations. When you know exactly what matters most, you can prioritize protection and recovery with greater precision. 2. Enhanced business continuity planning Move from static binders to dynamic, well-tested plans. Effective continuity work identifies how systems fail, how quickly services must return and which dependencies need isolation or backup. 3. Isolated recovery environments (IREs) Recover from a secure, standalone environment designed to remain safe even if production systems are compromised. IREs help you restore critical services faster and with greater integrity. 4. Infrastructure as code (IaC) Use automated, repeatable configuration definitions to rebuild environments quickly and accurately. IaC reduces guesswork and speeds up recovery after an attack. Together, these pillars form a resilience-driven operating model that strengthens every part of your digital ecosystem. Why cyber resilience matters now The financial impact of a breach is significant, with the average cost in healthcare reaching $10.1 million and roughly 21 days of downtime, but the operational consequences are even more urgent. When systems fail, patient care slows. Clinical workflows stall. Decisions take longer. That disruption can have real-world consequences. Recent studies show what you may already be seeing across the industry: 70% of attacks delay patient services 56% postpone diagnostic tests or procedures 28% correlate with increased patient mortality These numbers highlight the reason cyber resilience has become central to operational strategy. Downtime affects more than revenue or reputation. It affects clinical integrity, care delivery and patient outcomes. A resilient model helps you reduce that risk and strengthen your ability to operate confidently in a connected environment. Building a more resilient future Resilience begins long before an incident. You can take meaningful steps now that build real strength across your organization: Run scenario-based simulations that mimic real-world attacks Validate continuity plans under pressure, not just on paper Establish out-of-band communication channels that remain usable even if identity systems are compromised Automate recovery processes to accelerate the path back to normal operations Each step builds more stability into your environment and gives your teams clarity during high-stress moments. When your security, governance and operations functions align around a resilience-focused approach, you create a health system that can protect patients, preserve uptime and sustain trust, even during disruption. Cyber resilience doesnt replace cybersecurity. It elevates it. It helps you deliver dependable care with greater confidence and positions your organization for long-term stability in a world where digital systems are inseparable from clinical operations. Read the full white paper to explore how a resilience-based strategy supports secure, uninterrupted healthcare delivery. Tags: Cloud Insights Healthcare
Category: Telecommunications