I’ve always enjoyed mowing my lawn, dating back even to when I was a kid. And I always thought it seemed like an extravagance to pay a lawn service to do something I could do myself — I just couldn’t justify the expense. But, years ago, my thinking changed. I realized that I was missing out on precious time with my kids because I was spending half my summer weekends on yard work.

We’re seeing this same sort of shift in mindset happening more frequently among business and IT leaders regarding managed IT services. For many IT leaders, the prevailing school of thought used to be: “Why hire a partner to provide managed services for tasks we can do ourselves?” That’s changing to: “Why should we do these tasks ourselves, when they keep our staff from tackling more important projects?”

Here are four trends I see driving adoption of managed IT services.

Every day we talk with customers about making decisions regarding what I.T. services to maintain on-premises and which ones to shift to the cloud. This can be a somewhat daunting task, but I.T. professionals want and expect services to help them manage the decisions, transitions and ongoing operations.