What are the benefits of hiring a managed services provider?
When your business is tiny, you can pretty easily manage all of your own IT from a laptop. But as your business grows, so do your hardware, software, and networking requirements. And if you want to continue growing, you’ll need to hire a managed services provider to oversee your expanding IT footprint.
What is a Managed Services Provider?
A managed services provider, also known as an MSP, is an outsourced business or contractor that is given the responsibility to manage a company’s IT services. This includes the company’s network, application, software, hardware, security, and entire IT infrastructure. The MSP assumes full responsibility for making sure the appropriate technologies and services are being deployed in a way that fulfills the company’s needs.
In some cases, managed services providers are provided on location in the form of an employee or contractor, while other times they’re delivered remotely. Some MSPs even have software and hardware bundles that can be deployed remotely and at scale.
The Reasons You Should Hire a Managed Services Provider
The transition from self-managing all IT assets and technology to hiring a managed services provider to oversee everything can take a lot of time and energy up front. Thus, it begs the question: What do you stand to gain?
To answer the answer, here are several reasons why you should hire an MSP for your business:
1. Lower Costs
IT expenses aren’t something that most small business owners account for when they first launch their companies. However, over time, it actually becomes a fairly significant line item on the expense sheet. Switching over to an MSP may offer some relief in this area.
“Managed service providers structure their business to offer technology services cheaper than what it would cost an enterprise to do itself, at a higher level of quality, and with more flexibility and scalability,” Maria Korolov writes for CIO.com.
You can always try to look around and piece together a team of contractors and various IT specialists to handle your needs, but it’s typically best to hand it off to one provider who can handle everything under the same roof.
As Korolov explains further, “This is achieved through efficiencies of scale, as an MSP is able to hire specialists that smaller enterprises in particular may not be able to justify, and through automation, artificial intelligence, and machine learning — technologies that client companies may not have the expertise to implement themselves.”
In other words, you’re going to get the best value when you work with an MSP that’s able to deploy its services at scale. Your bottom line will certainly benefit!
2. Less Downtime
Research suggests that the average cost of IT downtime is $300,000 per hour. But here’s the good news: 51 percent of downtime is totally avoidable. And the rest of the risk can be significantly mitigated if you have the proper systems and plans in place.
There are three primary causes of downtime: power and internet outages, hardware failure, and cyber attacks. Managed IT services can help you avoid all three factors by giving you a stronger IT infrastructure and a proactive strategy that’s perfectly tailored to your business needs.
3. Timely Maintenance
When something goes wrong with your servers, internet connection, computers, or software, what do you do? For most businesses that self-manage their own IT, these issues create chaos. People start scrambling and there’s a feeling of panic in the air. But if you have an MSP working for you, there’s significantly less stress.
An MSP is always on the clock. They’re proactively working in the background to make sure things don’t go wrong. However, sometimes emergencies happen. When they do, they’re ready to step in and help. This timely maintenance ensures a better overall experience for both your team and your customers. In fact, you could say better customer service is an indirect benefit of using an MSP.
4. Improved Security
Finally, we can’t forget about improved security. By implementing a fully integrated strategy that includes active oversight, a managed services provider significantly lowers your risk of experiencing a costly cyber security issue. This isn’t to say attacks won’t occur. However, the success rate of attacks against your business will be much lower.
Adding it All Up
As your business grows, so does your IT footprint. And rather than try to piece together your own DIY strategy that may or may not work, you should carefully consider the benefits of working alongside a managed services provider or MSP. It could be one of the most important decisions you make for your business this year.