Why Business Owners Demand Managed Services
Research finds that the drivers for leveraging managed services can range from the desire to reduce costs to the belief that an outside party can provide top-notch security, uptime and general peace of mind. So, why do businesses seek managed service providers or MSP’s?
- Improved security
- Proactive approach to IT problems
- Better uptime
- Gain access to newer technologies
- Cost savings over in-house IT
- Peace of mind
- Free internal staff for strategic work
- Tap into cloud solutions
- Lack of internal IT
- Handle remote office IT
Let’s take a deeper look into the top five drivers:
1. Enhanced Security
Laptops, desktops, smartphones, applications, tablets, servers, operating systems, browsers, wearable technology and the like all store and transmit data and thus require the strictest security measures. Businesses are looking to managed service providers out of fear of becoming the next headline in a high-profile data breach or data loss incident.
Along these lines, compliance is becoming even more of an outsourced IT adoption driver for business owners, especially with regard to PCI security standards, FTC guidelines, and cyber insurance requirements.
2. Proactive Approach to IT Problems
This is a benefit of managed IT services that we discuss a lot because it is so important. Businesses don’t want to have to worry about their daily IT operations. They don’t want to have to second-guess the reliability and speediness of their network connection. Similarly, they don’t want to have to worry about what the state their IT environment will be when they commute in to work each morning. They choose to work with MSP’s because the MSP can provide 24x7x365 coverage. Services like RMM and the security suite MSP’s offers detect potential disturbances and vulnerabilities, enabling them to resolve these problems before they develop into more critical threats. With fully managed IT support, MSP’s can often troubleshoot and remediate glitches or bugs before they impact business. A CEO just doesn’t have the time to verify that the backups his company has taken actually worked! We already know that data management is a top IT challenge for businesses. So, in working with the right MSP, key executives can take advantage of proactive solutions that mitigate risk and offer business resilience.
3. Maximizing Uptime
Today, every business needs to be completely prepared for emergencies such as power failures, security breaches, data loss or other disasters that could damage their accounts and credibility. There’s a definite need for constant uptime and business continuity, and by including Backup/Disaster Recovery (BDR) as part of their services the MSP acts as a turnkey solution to ensure the safety of their clients’ precious data in any disaster situation. As a trusted MSP, it’s their role to help businesses identify and prevent the kind of damaging impact a downtime event could have on their business. To avoid long-term downtime, Businesses can leverage a MSP that will keep their IT systems running smoothly and efficiently, so they can focus on their core business operations. By outsourcing basic IT functions, Businesses will be able to maximize uptime and allocate their internal staff resources to focus on strategic projects and business activities that will help grow their business.
4. Access to Newer Technologies
Often, the businesses seeking MSP’s have over-burdened IT staff with employees who may lack the skills and training for certain tasks or can’t handle the whole of the company’s network on their own. In response, these companies recognize the value of working with an outside technical support team. Not only does IT outsourcing help with having an extra team of IT experts able to troubleshoot and remediate issues that arise, clients benefit from having access to the latest technology and business-grade solutions that maintain uptime and profitability, such as remote monitoring and management (RMM), backup and disaster recovery (BDR) and cloud computing. Investing in these tools increases the reliability of organizations’ IT infrastructure. Investing in the managed services business model tackles existing labor constraints and prevents internal IT departments from always having to play catch-up. By working with an MSP, business can also receive a virtual CIO (vCIO) in addition to the business-grade technology for their IT infrastructure. A vCIO is able to understand and manage the evolving technology landscape – allowing businesses to better plan for the long term and scale their business.
5. ROI/Cost Savings
One of the biggest business values of managed services is greater cost savings. IT budgets consist of many items: hardware costs, software and network infrastructure costs and maintenance costs, to name a few. Not to mention, the cost of labor is significant for any business. Businesses often have a need to reduce the size of its IT department because the cost of paying their current staff is far too high. It could also be the case that the business has no dedicated IT team and employees are forced to compensate by performing technical tasks that are outside of their core area of expertise, slowing productivity and preventing the business from being able to grow. With MSP’s, businesses are able to free up staff time to devote to higher value tasks and more easily predict their IT costs.
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