Every company is running on a loss if they do not have Managed Services for their IT department. Managed IT services enable organizations to outsource IT tasks to a vendor as per the contract or subscription of their services. These service

ByYOMA Business Solutions Pvt. Ltd.

Every company is running on a loss if they do not have Managed Services for their IT department. Managed IT services enable organizations to outsource IT tasks to a vendor as per the contract or subscription of their services. These services are mostly in place to lighten the workload of in-house teams and supplement teams with resources that they are unable to meet IT demand, or to replace in-house teams. These managed service providers (MSPs) can be useful for ensuring 24/7/365 coverage of IT duties and can contribute specialty knowledge or expertise that may not otherwise be available.

What Managed Services are most commonly used?

Managed IT services encompasses many responsibilities under its ambit but majority of them typically include:

  • Remote supervision, monitoring and management of hardware and infrastructure.

  • Providing security services, including monitoring, penetration testing, threat hunting, or incident response.

  • Configuration, monitoring, and management of cloud services. These can be rendered in cooperation with or outside of managed cloud services.

  • Communications support, including IP telephony services.

What are the benefits of Managed IT Service Benefits?

There are numerous benefits that organizations can gain from the right managed IT service provider wherein most of these benefits provided by these services majorly include:

Based on Contractual terms

Managed services enable you to set contractual terms that are required to carry out these IT tasks that include service level agreements (SLAs) which means that you don’t have to spend time recruiting, hiring, or training IT staff. These services help you to pay only for the coverage or services that you require and thereby allow you to avoid the associated costs that come with maintaining full-time employees.

Efficiency

Outsourcing your IT tasks to managed services is the smarter work to do in order to free your teams to focus on revenue-generating tasks. These providers can often provide you with the required guidance or recommendations to help you optimize the performance of your infrastructure that leads to increases in productivity and improved ROI.

Better management of uptime under Managed Services

Managed IT service providers are not bound and knotted to the same schedule as your other employees which potentially means these providers are often able to perform system updates and maintenance during off-hours. When these providers have flexible schedules to work around your own, you will witness greater uptime and fewer workflow disruptions.

What you need to consider before hiring Managed IT Services Providers:

There is no doubt that managed service providers can offer many benefits, but there are also some considerations you should be aware of when working with them:

  • Holding providers accountable — ensure that these providers have clearly defined and actionable SLAs and having them on contractual basis with your IT tasks is to given to a provider that you cannot hold accountable results in frustration and losses. Whereas, this accountability should have included clearer reporting of services rendered for system performance and in case, a provider is unwilling to provide metrics or share system data with you, they should be avoided.

  • Invest in great strategic IT planning—managed IT providers will help you strategically plan infrastructure upgrades, improve on tricky configuration changes, and additions. If they don’t, you won’t be able to derive full value from these managed services. Which means that these providers will only need to understand your current infrastructure but make efforts to manage it with respect to your business goals and objectives. Which is why before planning on hiring them, you should extend beyond the immediate future into the next year or two.

  • Finding a MSP that has a good track record—it should be a known fact by now that not all providers are created equally. When you are considering a provider, you will have to verify their track record with other organizations in your industry and scale. When you find reliable MSPs, they will have to let you know which comparable organizations they are working with. They can also often help set up opportunities to talk with someone from that company. If due to any circumstances, a provider is not willing to share proof of value, then they are a poor choice of investment.

How to make Effective Decisions about IT MSP

When you are trying to screen through a list of managed service providers be it under any domain, there are several important steps you can take to ensure that the one you choose fits your needs. Although these steps require some extra effort, you must ensure to take careful assessments of your needs, assets, and goals that helps in ensuring that you get the most from any managed service provider that you proceed with hiring.

Assess current IT systems

Start by taking a thorough assessment of your current IT needs and costs is the first step to finding an MSP as you will need to understand what infrastructure and workflows needs to be managed and also assess what all resources you currently have as per the budget allocation for management by aligning them with you business’s goals.

Get an audit of your current systems

Once you’ve narrowed down to a list of providers, you may want them to perform an audit of your systems which can help you determine if they have the support and experience needed to manage your assets.

You will have to ensure that your providers are competent with any specialized hardware or software you are using or intend to use in the future and they should also be familiar with any industry or compliance standards that apply to your systems and data. However, if the managed service providers struggle to properly audit your systems it is unlikely that they will be able to support systems effectively.

Consider scalability and flexibility of your MSP:

When you screen through your potential vendors, make sure that you pay attention to the capacity of the services that can supply your organization with. They should be able to scale with you and ideally should have more bandwidth, service hours, and expertise than you need. In case, they do not, then your provider might become the bottleneck reducing your capacity and performance.

You will have to consider this factor as it is particularly important if you are planning big infrastructure changes in the near future. For a perfect example, consider the factor on cloud migration in which you will need to identify a provider that can support any growth your organization goes through without sacrificing performance or coverage.