What is a Managed Service Provider?
“What Every Business Owner Must Know About Hiring An Honest, Competent, Responsive And Fairly Priced Computer Consultant”
Don’t Trust Your Company’s Critical Data And Operations To Just Anyone! This Business Advisory Guide Will Arm You With 21 Revealing Questions You Should Ask Any Computer Consultant Before Giving Them Access To Your Company’s Network
Why You May Need an IT Service Provider?
1. Maximize Systems Availability
Having a strategic partner when the lights go out allows you to continue to manage your business while a professional team immediately begins getting things back on line fast. The longer your business is offline the longer it's losing productivity, revenue and the team is losing moral and confidence things will get back to normal without and the added burden of overtime.
2. Your Security Posture
- Comprehensive security management of all network devices
- Proactive software patching and updating to close security loopholes
- Efficiently delivering the latest threat intelligence
- 24/7 network security monitoring provided a security operations center (SOC)
3. IT Support for a Flat Rate
There is a difference between "Break-Fix" and Managed Services, and typically that is the approach to doing business in general. The classic break-fix model assumes the local computer store is just waiting around for your call and they will drop everything to help you, but not until they confirm their hourly rate and how much time they can allocate to your business. When you are working with a quality MSP, you will be in an evolving partnership working regularly on what is important to your business and the MSP is actively monitoring and being proactive to manage your systems. They will probably call you to let you know about an outage they are planning to take corrective action so you don't have the issues in the first place. This would all be done for the same rate every month so the client can have a predictable and manageable budget. Generally this type of arrangement removes the friction of discussing costs whenever something needs to be done, you just know they will be there and get the job done for a single monthly rate. Most quality MSP organizations will setup monthly or quarterly business reviews to discuss quality or service, number of calls or tickets, changes that may be required to keep the network secure and this is also where the rate is discussed.
4. Building Your Technology Roadmap
Being honest and open about your technology journey is important when starting a new partnership with your MSP. It is critical to have a handle on short, near and long term vision as well as ensuring an understanding of where you came from as well. The value isn't necessarily about repeating the past, but is more about knowing how decisions where made and preventing "group think" and the limitations that tend to build walls and preventing the proper research to new options and possibilities.
Having a well defined vision and building the roadmap to support the development and implementation of that vision improves the efficiencies and predictability for budgeting, staffing, operations and growth of the company.
5. Always "On"
The business of managing many client environments and providing a superior customer experience has lead most MSP's to develop or purchase a diverse set of tools which provide deep insights into the overall health of their client environment (both inside and outside), networks and devices. A quality MSP can seamlessly provide 24 hour a day, 7 days a week care using the tools they have in place with the trained staff to back that up. The client no longer needs to plan around holiday's or vacations and just needs to focus on their business and do their part to foster and evolve the partnership.