Most IT infrastructure outsourced managed services suffer from a persistent and deeply rooted challenge: the perception that the service provider does not truly understand the customer’s environment. This perception, though sometimes unfair, is widespread across industries—from BFSI and telecom to healthcare and manufacturing. It often becomes the primary reason organisations replace their managed service partners at the end of a contract cycle, even when contractual service levels were technically met.
At the heart of this issue lies the disconnect between technical execution and business relevance. Infrastructure engineers, who form the backbone of most managed services operations, are trained to manage systems, networks, storage, databases, and cloud platforms based on technical parameters. They focus on server uptimes, ticket closures, patch cycles, vulnerability verifications, and change execution. While these are essential, they do not naturally translate into business outcomes. The organisation consuming the services cares less about server uptime percentages and more about whether their customer onboarding system works flawlessly at peak times, whether downtime affects revenue, and whether a delay in patching could threaten compliance.
Because engineers often lack exposure to these business contexts, the organisation perceives them as disconnected from real-world impact. When an engineer sees an alert for a CPU spike, they may simply follow incident workflow steps. However, if that CPU spike affects a critical revenue-generating application; say payment processing, the lack of urgency or contextual prioritisation can frustrate the business teams, even if the SLA response time is met. This disconnect leads to an unfortunate but predictable outcome: SLA adherence but dissatisfaction. Providers proudly highlight their SLA dashboards, while customers quietly question the partnership’s value.
Another contributing factor is the siloed mentality within managed services teams. Infrastructure operations are typically divided into domains—network, compute, storage, backup, security, middleware, and cloud. Each domain has its own managers, KPIs, and engineering teams. While specialisation is necessary, it often fosters a silo-driven culture in which engineers optimise only for their own domain, rarely collaborating deeply across teams. Issues that span multiple layers; like a slow application caused by a combination of a network configuration, VM resource limits, and database slow queries, are often bounced between teams. To the business user, this looks like incompetence or a lack of ownership. Managers can also reinforce the silo problem. When leadership focuses exclusively on technical SLAs and ticket metrics, engineers follow suit. Business alignment, cross-team collaboration, and proactive improvement efforts become secondary priorities. Even when service providers attempt to embed customer-specific insights through knowledge bases, SOPs, or hypercare documents, these initiatives tend to be one-time activities rather than ongoing, living practices.
From the customer’s perspective, the frustration is compounded by the expectation that outsourcing should improve business outcomes, not just maintain technical stability. Their assumption is that managed service providers will internalise their ecosystem, understand the dependencies between systems, and evolve operations over time. When this expectation goes unmet, the engagement becomes transactional, and the provider is reduced to a vendor, replaceable at the end of term. But despite the recurring nature of this problem across the industry, it is not unsolvable. It simply requires a shift in mindset, tooling, engagement models, and culture from both sides. Service providers must evolve from SLA-driven operations to business-contextualised operations, and customers must invest in the right governance structures, knowledge transfer models, and partnership frameworks. When both sides contribute, the outcome can shift significantly—from dissatisfaction to measurable value creation.
The solutions do not lie in stricter SLAs or tighter governance alone. They lie in improving contextual understanding, breaking silos, enabling real collaboration, and aligning success metrics with business impact, not just system performance. Organisations that get this right often enjoy multi-year, stable, and high-value relationships with their service providers. Those who do not enter a cycle of repeated vendor switches, each time believing the next partner will magically understand the business better. To break this cycle, both service providers and customers need to adopt a set of deliberate practices—some cultural, some procedural, and some structural. These practices transform managed services from a technically competent but context-blind operation into a proactive, business-aligned function that genuinely contributes to organisational goals.
Cirvesh
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