Enhancing ITeS operations and service delivery with modern virtualisation solutions

The ITeS industry is operating amidst rising competitive pressures and combating advancing AI and automation solutions. Peak service delivery efficiency, workforce productivity, efficiency, and data security will be paramount for winning these battles. 

In its current state, the ITeS industry is battling with widespread, lasting change.  Even though the industry saw revenue growth bounce back in 2023,¹ this is hardly a time to rejoice – for the competitive and financial advantage that outsourcing once represented, is slowly fading away due to a number of factors. 

Advancements in modern technologies, tightening industry regulations, and fluctuating demand amidst global slowdown are steadily eroding the value proposition that ITeS companies once brought to their global clientele.  

But this battle isn’t lost as yet – as long as ITeS companies are ready to acknowledge the winds of change. Now is the time for introspection – i.e., looking inwards, and recognising the technical challenges that impede service delivery in today’s environment.  

By rebuilding their IT infrastructure to support agile, secure, and efficient service delivery, ITeS businesses have the opportunity to shine once again. 

ITeS industry at an inflection point 

The ITeS industry delivers economies of scale benefits to a wide range of onshore and offshore businesses looking to outsource services like: 

• Telemarketing 
• IT helpdesk 
• Customer support 
• Business Process Outsourcing 
• Credit card decisioning, and more. 

However, three key factors are undermining the value proposition that ITeS companies once represented for their clientele: 

1. Industry regulations: Modern regulations prohibit the free flow of customer data beyond geographical boundaries. This makes it challenging to deliver services to offshore clients in a compliant fashion. 
2. Demand fluctuation: Amidst the global slowdown, ITeS clients are experiencing fluctuating demand, and therefore looking for businesses that offer services on a pay-per-use model. 
3. Technology innovations: AI and automation technologies are making it possible to effectively complete cognitive tasks that were once done by human employees.  

Lastly, ITeS offerings from upcoming markets like Southeast Asia are undercutting existing players of established markets like India.  

All these factors have compelled the ITeS sector to pursue peak efficiency of service delivery and bolster its security capabilities to offer compliant solutions to its clientele. 

Key challenges facing the ITeS sector 

• Offering flexible and scalable services: As clients demand flexible, pay-per-use services, ITeS organisations need to build this agility in their operating model, right from their IT infrastructure to human resource utilisation. 
• Meeting employee demands amidst high attrition: As attrition rates remain high despite a net drop compared to 2022, catering to employee demands for remote work is an important tactic to curb attrition. 
• Delivering a cost advantage over new offerings: To compete with AI and automation offerings, ITeS companies need to adopt these tools while attaining significant cost savings in their current operating model. 
• Ensuring compliant service delivery: Lastly, ITeS companies must adapt their IT infrastructure to securely deliver their services to clients without violating industry regulations. 

A moment for introspection 

Examining the shortcomings in the current IT infrastructure of a typical ITeS organisation 

A closer look at the typical ITeS organisation shows that most are unequipped to play by these new rules of success. While most of the above outcomes are attainable, the IT infrastructure of these organisations represents a major gap that must be filled. 

Here are a few ways in which suboptimal IT is impeding the desired outcomes at ITeS companies: 

1. Enabling remote work: Reliance on legacy IT makes it difficult to enable secure remote work. Most either rely on expensive VPNs or other solutions to facilitate remote connectivity. Moreover, enabling client environment access with user devices presents a different challenge altogether. 
2. Ensuring compatibility: Connecting users to client environments can prove difficult due to compatibility issues. The problem appears every time the employees are deployed on a new project. 
3. Audit and security gaps: Clients are typically held responsible for compliance slips of their contractors. ITeS companies often fail to meet stringent security and audit standards posed by these regulations. 
4. High EUC costs: Whether in remote or in-office models, end-user computing represents a significant cost in the ITeS industry. These costs are aggravated by frequent upgrades and changing client requirements. 
5. Lack of scalability: While ITeS companies do think about scalability, this consideration isn’t extended to EUC. As a result, machines may lie wasted in their inventory, or new ones need to be acquired with rising demand. 
6. Consistent performance: Lastly, ensuring consistent performance when orchestrating a large workforce can prove difficult in remote models. This is either solved by upgrading user machines, or other network elements. 

Rebuilding the ITeS organisation for a digital-first economy 

Leveraging robust end-user computing solutions for an agile and resilient foundation 

Given the above shortcomings in the technology infrastructure, ITeS organisations would find it prudent to modernise their end-user computing solutions to find success in a digital-first economy. From this perspective, it is crucial to leverage the power of modern virtualisation and end-user computing solutions for the right use cases.  

Consider the following applications of end-user computing solutions to bridge the infrastructure gaps in the modern ITeS organisation. 

#1. Deploy a resilient foundation for remote and hybrid work 

Why: ITeS operating models rely on a large workforce to deliver key services. When the talent market is in the favour of the employer, return-to-office (RTO) mandates may work, but when the tide turns, organisations start seeing a high churn rate. 

That’s why, it is prudent to build remote readiness to achieve long-term resilience. The advantage of such an approach is that it enables ITeS companies to leverage remote workers at a financial advantage while offering the flexibility of hybrid work to office employees.  

To make this vision a reality, a few things are critical: 

1. Your users should be able to securely connect to client environments from their own devices, as well as company/client-owned machines. If you are using VDI, make sure that it can connect to client systems with full-tunnel VPNs. 
2. Consider using a modern ZTNA solution to secure remote access to client environments. This can help you weed out less secure VPN-based approaches, or more expensive (but unnecessary) VDI deployments running on VMware (now Omnissa)/Citrix. 
3. Make sure that hybrid workers can access their in-office PCs from home. This might be crucial for power users who need to urgently address issues in client systems. 

#2. Build scalability and flexibility into your EUC infrastructure 

Why: In the ITeS industry, demand variability has become the new normal. Clients expect pay-per-use services and prefer flexible contracts that they can discontinue when they no longer require your services. 

To stay profitable in this climate of servitisation, ITeS companies need to build flexibility into every aspect of their operating model, including their EUC infrastructure. Instead of locking capital into physical machines and software licences, consider EUC solutions that can be provisioned or retired as needed. 

This can be achieved with: 

1. Virtual desktops: Virtual desktops leverage central servers to provision compute and storage resources for each user. These desktops are then accessed by users on thin clients. The advantage of virtual desktops is that they can be scaled up and down anytime, as required. 
2. Scale-tolerant solutions: Ensure that every element in your EUC stack is scalable. This includes ZTNA deployments, identity and authentication solutions, and networking devices/applications. 

#3. Address performance and compatibility issues with adaptive VDI solutions 

Why: ITeS organisations undertake different projects, with each engagement posing different EUC requirements. Some projects may require users to run apps that have high resource demands, whereas others may not. Moreover, some client apps may run only on Linux, whereas others may require Windows environments.  

In all of these scenarios, it is crucial for ITeS organisations to ensure maximum compatibility and high performance to maintain readiness for all scenarios. However, it is equally important to ensure that computing resources are not wasted. VDI solutions make it easy to achieve both of these outcomes at the same time. Here’s how: 

1. Compatibility: Virtual Desktop Infrastructure makes it possible to spin Linux or Windows environments within minutes. Instead of requiring users or IT admins to create dual boot configurations, VDI simplifies this through centralised management of desktop farms. Moreover, some applications can be packaged and delivered virtually to any environment with VDI. 
2. Performance: Virtual EUC solutions are typically monitored with an End-User Experience Management Tool (EUEM) to gauge performance and user experience. However, some VDI solutions (like Accops VDI) have EUEM capabilities baked into the VDI offering – making it easy to identify performance issues and take corrective actions accordingly.   
3. Resource optimization: If an application performance degrades, IT admins can typically respond by increasing computing resources for a remote user. On the other hand, if the resources are not being fully utilised, they can be retired while keeping the user experience intact. 

#4. Adopt capabilities to deliver compliant services to offshore clients 

Why: A history of poor compliance or the inability to assure clients of compliant service delivery can hurt growth prospects for ITeS organisations. Compliance regulations typically require assurance (and evidence) of preventing illegal data flows, unauthorised access to sensitive data, and implementation of requisite safeguards. 

ITeS companies can attain high levels of security and deliver compliant services with VDI and modern ZTNA solutions. While SASE deployments can also help, these are typically expensive to implement in hybrid/remote models. 

Here are a few ways in which ITeS organisations can exploit these solutions: 

1. Zero-trust solutions: Modern ZTNA gateway solutions can help ITeS companies connect their users to client environments, whether their users are working from the office, or their own devices on a public network. With ZTNA and VDI solutions, admins can ensure that the data never leaves the established perimeter. Moreover, some solutions also maintain audit logs of all access requests and flag suspicious requests in real-time. 
2. Biometric authentication: While password-based authentication may prove insecure for high-risk scenarios, biometric authentication offers more reliable security. In conjunction with remote user monitoring, some security solutions also enable admins to restrict user actions (like internet access, data copy, and screenshots) – thus forming a highly trusted environment for compliant service delivery. 

#5. Minimise the cost of EUC without compromising the employee experience 

Lastly, virtualisation solutions can help ITeS companies not only lower the TCO of EUC but also the management overheads associated with them. With self-service or scheduled provisioning, IT admins can ensure that high-resource virtual machines are provisioned only when the users require them (i.e., during working hours). Such solutions can be highly advantageous for call centre or customer service businesses, where employees work within dedicated application environments.  

Moreover, VDI enables centralised management of EUC machines. As a result, patching, updating, and monitoring can be performed by fewer IT workers, thus lowering the management costs of EUC.  

Mature your ITeS service delivery with Accops 

ITeS organisations looking to exploit the above solutions for maturing their EUC infrastructure must look for solution providers that address their business challenges with each use case. The advantage of such an approach is reduced complexity and proven RoI on technology spend. 

Accops offers a wide range of virtualisation solutions that address the above challenges that persist in the ITeS industry today. Our solutions specifically target the need for interoperability between various technologies in the EUC stack. Therefore, Accops solutions bring much-needed mobility into your EUC stack, as well as in your ability to deliver services efficiently to onshore and offshore clients. 

Accops virtualisation solutions span cloud and hypervisor-agnostic VDI, digital workspaces, thin and zero clients, modern ZTNA gateway solutions, access security solutions, and more. With Accops powering your EUC, your ITeS organisation is poised to find success in today’s highly competitive services market. 

What next? 

As ITeS companies arm themselves for the competitive services markets of today, modernising their end-user computing stack will be a key focus area. Given the upsides of virtualisation, it would be prudent to incrementally adopt new solutions that help address the most pressing business challenges. 

Start this journey by experiencing the power of Accops in your ITeS organisation. Get in touch with us to see how Accops can empower your ITeS operating model.