Is It Any Good to Work with Managed Service Providers? — Part 1

The IT department of any average business has to handle a variety of tasks, including cloud storage, cloud computing, cloud backup, data protection, data mobility in the data management areas, and a plethora of other tasks while ensuring compliance within a set of IT standards. Needless to say, IT department’s workload is tremendous, which is why considerable resources are allocated for its seamless operation.
Studies have shown that most companies use only a third of their available IT budget for new projects and initiatives, and the remaining two-third is used up for merely keeping the IT system up and running. However, with a Managed Services Provider (MSP), you can change all this, possibly reverse these numbers.
An MSP can reduce your IT costs by managing your company’s entire IT infrastructure remotely for a set, affordable fee. Outsourcing your IT needs to an MSP is not only convenient but also allow you to make the best use of your resources and minimize other associated costs.

Here are some of the major benefits of working with an MSP:

Predictable Costs within your Budget:

IT related costs are very often seen as expenses and widely considered unavoidable expenses to keep the company going. This means, there is no room for a “break-fix” type of model, which causes your monthly expenses to go up and down and fluctuate. This, in turn, will cause increased strain in budgeting and planning. To work around this problem, MSPs can sit down with you and come up with options so that you can pay a flat fee and divert your focus on what you do best — your business — and take the guessing out of IT budgets. Your company’s goals become aligned under such flat fee structure — any technical issues will be taken care of by the MSP, not by your local technical resources, reducing your costs. It will be in the best interest of the MSP to act quickly in the case of any issues. If not, both parties lose revenue if the issue is not handled in an effective and timely matter.

Proactive Approach

An MSP monitors your IT systems 24/7, which means problems related to the infrastructure can be detected in early stages, and fixed before any major damage takes place. For instance, data breaches can cause significant loss of important data, but with an MSP you can limit the risk almost completely through its high-level online backup mechanisms.
Another benefit of the MSP’s proactive approach is minimum downtime in an event of setting up and running cloud backup and/or cloud computing services and also recovery during a disaster.
Continued in Part II …