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Technology, including AI/ML, location intelligence, and data analytics, is accelerating on multiple fronts simultaneously. When your organization needs a managed services provider for scalable, cost-effective solutions to help you modernize your infrastructure or take advantage of innovations like generative AI, you should expect expertise that’s nimble, flexible, and hyper-responsive to subtle changes in the cloud ecosystem. You need flexible cloud computing services that support your unique vision.
At SADA, we pride ourselves on meeting our customers where they are and taking them beyond where they want to go. In this blog post, we explore the mindset that informs SADA Flex Services, which improve upon the traditional managed services model with deep expertise in Google Cloud, an emphasis on proactive problem solving, and a broad scope of support built upon your organization’s desired business outcomes.
What are SADA Flex Services?
There’s no such thing as a business that isn’t dependent on technology. And with technologies advancing exponentially in myriad directions at once, it’s never been more crucial to get support from experts who make it their business to stay ahead of the technological curve. Traditionally, this has meant engaging with managed services. SADA’s Flex Services represent an evolution of this trusted model.
Managed services used to be only about maintaining the status quo. Now we expect managed service providers to not just “keep the lights on,” but to serve as a catalyst for continuous transformation.This shift reflects an awareness that staying competitive means embracing change as a constant.
SADA’s Flex Services are at the forefront of this evolution. With Flex Services, you don’t just get support and maintenance–you get a partnership that empowers your business to continuously innovate and adapt in a landscape that is perpetually evolving.
Let’s dive into eight ways that SADA Flex Services excel over traditional managed services.
8 ways SADA Flex Services differ from traditional managed services
1. Tooling and processes
SADA Flex Services offer a dynamic, plug-and-play model that seamlessly integrates with your organization’s existing tools and processes. This adaptability is a hallmark of the program, enabling your business to leverage your prior investments and methodologies.
By contrast, traditional managed services often follow rigid frameworks, limiting the incorporation of existing tools and processes. SADA Flex Services’ flexibility ensures smoother transitions, quicker adoption, and reduced disruption to established workflows, enhancing operational efficiency and encouraging innovation.
2. 24×7 support
The proactive, outcome-driven approach of SADA Flex Services stands in contrast to the reactive, usage-driven support of traditional managed services. SADA Flex Services prioritize aligning support activities with strategic objectives.
Staying on top of your cloud environment means anticipating issues, aiming for preventive measures, and ensuring continuous availability. Traditional managed services might focus on reacting to incidents based solely on usage metrics, potentially missing strategic priorities, or failing to address underlying issues that could impact long-term objectives.
3. Scope of support
SADA Flex Services take a holistic approach by providing full-stack support, managing everything from application performance to code-related issues. Proactive management ensures a comprehensive understanding of your organization’s infrastructure and applications, enabling quicker problem resolution and proactive optimization.
On the other hand, traditional managed services often work within predefined, siloed scopes. Such a limited focus may result in delays in identifying cross-stack issues, resulting in fragmented solutions rather than holistic optimizations.
4. Security
SADA Flex Services prioritize security by adopting a “least privilege” model with temporary credentials. This approach minimizes the potential attack surface, ensuring robust security at all levels.
Conversely, traditional managed services might rely on persistent access and broader admin rights, which can introduce security vulnerabilities and increase exposure to potential threats. SADA Flex Services’ security measures align with modern security best practices, minimizing risks and enhancing overall resilience.
5. Optimization and transformation
One of the significant distinctions between SADA Flex Services and traditional managed services is the approach to optimization and transformation. SADA Flex Services not only maintain but continually enhance the cloud environment, actively seeking opportunities for improvement and innovation. This methodology aligns with the evolving nature of technology and business requirements.
Traditional managed services, on the other hand, often focus on basic operational tasks, neglecting proactive optimization and transformational initiatives, potentially stagnating an organization’s technological advancement.
6. Operations handoffs
Efficiency and clarity are central to SADA Flex Services’ operational processes. Runbook-driven approaches ensure well-documented and seamless handoffs between teams and operational phases. This structured approach minimizes errors, accelerates onboarding, and streamlines transitions between different service providers or internal teams.
Meanwhile, traditional managed services often lack clear and documented handoff processes, leading to operational inefficiencies, misunderstandings, and potential disruptions during transitions.
7. Platform expertise
SADA Flex Services boast specialized expertise in Google Cloud Platform (GCP), with dedicated specialists and recognition in industry reports like Gartner’s Magic Quadrant. This expertise ensures in-depth knowledge and tailored solutions aligned with platform-specific best practices.
In contrast, traditional managed services may have broader, cloud-agnostic expertise but might lack depth in specialized platforms, potentially leading to suboptimal solutions for platform-specific challenges.
8. Engineering utilization
SADA Flex Services prioritize demand-usage parity, ensuring optimal utilization of engineering resources in alignment with your organization’s business needs. By dynamically adjusting resource allocations based on demand, SADA Flex Services prevent inefficiencies stemming from underutilization or overcommitment of engineering resources.
Conversely, traditional managed services may require fixed commitments that don’t align with actual usage, resulting in either underutilization, overprovisioning, or additional costs for adjusting resource allocations.
Going deeper: the difference between competitive and comparative advantages
Now that we’ve explored some of the ways that SADA Flex services are designed to go beyond what many have come to expect from managed services, let’s delve into the business concept of comparative vs. competitive advantages. Let’s start by defining these concepts before explaining how SADA’s Flex Services cater to both, with a particular emphasis on feature velocity and the DORA metrics.
Defining the advantages
Competitive advantage: When a company can deliver the same products or services as competitors but in a more effective manner, such as higher quality, faster delivery, or with innovation. Competitive advantage is increasingly defined by feature velocity–the speed at which a company can develop and launch new products and features. This velocity is critical in staying ahead of competitors.
Comparative advantage: This concept involves producing goods or services at a lower opportunity cost. It’s about being more efficient and cost-effective in specific areas compared to competitors. In business, this translates to cost savings, process automation, and optimal resource utilization.
Embracing the DORA metrics for competitive advantage
The DORA (DevOps Research and Assessment) metrics have become pivotal in measuring and achieving competitive advantage in software development and operations. They focus on:
- Deployment frequency: Indicating how fast new features and updates are delivered.
- Lead time for changes: Reflecting the efficiency of the development process.
- Time to restore service: Measuring the ability to quickly recover from failures.
- Change failure rate: Assessing the quality and reliability of software deployments.
- Reliability: Ensuring the software performs consistently and satisfactorily.
By excelling in these metrics, your organization can significantly outpace your competitors, making feature velocity a cornerstone of competitive advantage.
Flex Services: balancing both advantages
SADA Flex Services are uniquely positioned to deliver both competitive and comparative advantage, in the following two ways:
- Competitive advantage through velocity: Flex Services are designed to enhance your feature velocity, aligning with the DORA metrics. This means faster innovation, quicker deployment, and more efficient recovery from failures, keeping you ahead of the game.
- Comparative advantage through efficiency and cost-effectiveness: By focusing on reducing operational costs, improving system performance, and managing risks, Flex Services amplify your comparative advantage, enabling you to operate more efficiently than your competitors.
A synergy of advantages with Flex Services
Flex Services not only reduce the cost of operations but also help you increase feature velocity without compromising safety with DevOps and SRE methodologies. SADA’s expertise frees your talented engineers to focus on new product development rather than maintenance.
This dual advantage has proven to be a powerful force multiplier. By rapidly releasing more features and optimizing both costs and risks, you maintain market leadership and achieve desired business outcomes.
With SADA’s services, you can focus on developing and deploying innovative solutions while we handle the underlying automation and infrastructure challenges. Whether it’s machine learning, serverless computing, software development, or big data analytics, you’ll enjoy more bandwidth to pursue groundbreaking services.
SADA Flex Services: infinitely adaptable to your business
Sometimes you need a services provider to swoop in, fix a problem, and be done with it. Other times, you need a trusted partner who’s available to provide guidance on an ongoing basis. SADA services are specifically designed to accommodate either scenario, or both at once.
“Our aim is to provide the most efficient and effective services engagement, empowering our customers to achieve the most impactful outcomes from their technology adoption and transformation investments, in an accelerated and sustainable way,” says SADA CEO Tony Safoian, “Based on feedback from our customers, we have released the most flexible set of services engagement models in the world. Whether it’s T&M, Fixed Fee, Flex Managed Services, or all three at the same time, we can meet your organization where it is today, and help to take you where you want to be, with the fastest time to value.”
One-size-fits-all solutions can’t address problems that are constantly changing in scope. Every organization’s cloud footprint, tech stack, talent pool, and regulatory landscape is different, so every business represents a unique set of opportunities and challenges.
From the get-go, SADA experts focus on fully comprehending these unique parameters, building upon your organization’s strengths to find efficiencies that keep costs to a minimum.
On the other hand, there’s something to be said for the tried-and-true. SADA experts develop best practices based on continued exposure to common technological challenges, and it behooves all of us to learn from common use cases and identify standard operating procedure (SOPs) to confront industry-wide problems.
Maintaining this balance between nimble adaptability and established, trustworthy procedures drives value for SADA customers. On the one hand, you want to stay competitive against other organizations that are also developing, say, generative AI solutions. On the other, your organization’s specific blend of talent, IP, experience, and leadership opens up opportunities to express your market value in a radically different way. Your dedicated SADA team helps you maintain this balance to your advantage.
Ultimately, this combination of approaches means maintaining a repertoire of best practices that can be applied nimbly, on-the-fly, and in quick response to rapidly changing circumstances.
Case in point: Expel managed detection and response services
Expel helps their customers make sense of security data by demystifying alerts and turning them into prescriptive outcomes. Their particular strength lies in being able to pull together data from multiple sources–cloud, SaaS, on-prem, network, SIEM–to generate recommendations to protect customer assets.
Expel approached SADA with a technically complicated undertaking. They wanted to upgrade their Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) clusters to GKE 1.25 and make sure this upgrade accounted for the complexities of their core engineering platform.
“SADA’s Flex Services team delivered an upgrade that was on-time and flawless across even our most significantly-sized clusters,” says Evan Benoit, Expel’s Senior Manager of SRE. “I look forward to SADA Flex Services supporting us on our GKE maintenance and upgrades so that Expel’s Site Reliability Engineering team can focus on advancing our SRE mission across the enterprise.”
Pashtoun Youssof, SADA Director, Support Engineering, praised Expel’s organizational strengths and adaptive mindset in action. “Expel needed a fast, seamless upgrade that didn’t pull their engineering talent away from business-critical tasks,” says Youssof. “We were thrilled by how easily Expel’s team dovetailed with SADA’s Flex Services experts, and even more thrilled by the results–a successful upgrade with dedicated support that gives Expel ample breathing room to further perfect their innovative security platform for their customers.”
Sign up for SADA Flex Services and scale the cloud your way
SADA is here to be your ally in the ever-evolving world of cloud solutions. With highly differentiated service models and a commitment to your business’s growth, we are excited to help you harness the power of the cloud.
Contact us today to start the conversation on how SADA Flex Services can support your most ambitious cloud vision.
