Why It May Be Time To Hand Over Your IT To A Managed Service Provider

Managed Service Provider. It’s a buzzword you’ll often hear throughout the business world. If you’ve been searching for the right company to provide IT services, you’ve probably seen it again and again.

As defined, Managed Services allows a business to offload their IT operations. The managed service provider assumes all responsibility for monitoring, managing and fixing problems for the IT systems within the business.

Companies today are increasingly relying on outside providers for part of their IT needs. But that doesn’t mean MSPs replace your IT function; in many cases, they complement rather than replace. MSPs help free up existing IT staff to focus on more strategic projects. It allows them to begin development and implementation of projects that in many cases have been calendared for months, even years, without proper time for implementation.

Managed service providers originally were companies consisting of networks of people that were self-taught in the area of break-fix maintenance. When something broke, the company called the service provider to come and fix it. And hopefully, it worked.

As time went on, these networks became more developed and offered greater tools, programs, and procedures. They would periodically come on-site to perform systems reviews and look for hints of bigger problems that were stored within. Still, in most cases, you simply could not see what didn’t exist. Most support still happened only when emergency situations occurred, and the MSP was called in to fix it.

Since that time, hardware and software has continued to improve. Technology continued to change. And today’s managed service providers are better equipped than ever before. The managed services software used today allows providers to

  • Be alerted for every symptom or risk that occurs as it happens
  • Be alerted when anything of importance needs to be addressed

Support services today need to oversee increasingly complex IT environments and be quick to move on everything that takes place. If you fall behind in any area – backups, patches, outages, problems or security issues – it can quickly have a negative impact in all areas of business, including your customer service relationships and ultimately your bottom line.

Businesses today can no longer afford a “break-fix” mentality. A broken system can quickly bring your world to a crashing halt. You simply no longer have time for this.

One of the biggest benefits of managed services is discovering and fixing symptoms long before they have the opportunity to become problems. A well-maintained computer network will always run better than the alternative. A proactive 24-hour monitored system will help you reduce cost and increase operating efficiencies right from the beginning.

Is your network running as efficiently as it could?