A business leader is not someone who knows -it-all. An IT outage or network downtime due to hardware failure, human error, software failure, or natural disaster adversely impacts a business in terms of lost revenue and compliance failure. Additionally, it leads to a reduction in customer satisfaction levels and damages brand reputation.
Managed services can:
- Increase capabilities of end-users,
- Enable in-house teams to focus on strategic business activities, and
- Help leaders to focus on core competencies.
When should you speak with a Managed Services Provider (MSP)?
- Did your business achieve all goals last year or did you miss out on a few due to lack of support or service?
- Did your business suffer IT outages and systems downtime often?
- Did you modify your budget to tweak your enterprise apps to achieve smoother app performance?
- Did you lose business/customer data as you didn’t have in-house team of skilled resources to maintain the business apps for your enterprise?
Today, IT managers must achieve cost optimization in managing the different organizational needs – business performance, operational excellence, data privacy and security. Ideally, you must contact a Managed Services Provider when setting future business strategies and deploying new applications in your IT environment.
Your in-house team may not have the skills related to new technologies or maintain new applications. To address this situation, you may hire a contractor. However, it may be expensive and return less value in terms of overall business performance.
Managed IT Services
Let us understand about the benefits of managed services. In 2022, the market size of managed services was USD 267.3 billion. It is expected to record a CAGR of 13.6% between 2023-2030. If we talk about specific regions, North America is the largest market, while Asia Pacific is the fastest growing in managed services.
Enterprises availing managed services will experience reduced downtime and can also provide value-added services to customers such as application testing, expert consultancy, maintenance, and support.
Do you have a dedicated in-house IT team or starting from the scratch?
Not only do managed services help to manage costs, but it also helps to improve scalability, security, expertise, and reliability.
Now, we shall understand, in detail, how managed services help enterprises.
1. Improve productivity of your in-house team: IT systems management involves repetitive tasks of application management, upgrades, access management, and troubleshooting. Often, the in-house team is approached to resolve urgent issues through support tickets raised by employees or customers. An MSP can address these issues, making your in-house team available for other strategic IT activities.
2. Technical expertise: Every IT professional specializes in a specific technology domain and comes with an expertise in developing specific type of applications. Hence, it may be difficult to hire the best talent. An MSP has a team of technology experts having rich experience, technical expertise, and training to cater to your IT needs. For instance, an MSP for a BI application will have a team of engineers with experience and working knowledge of Tableau to help enterprises manage, optimize and support the smooth running of the application.
3. Cost Effectiveness: It is a wise decision to outsource your IT needs to an MSP as you pay only for the services you need. In case of software updates or troubleshooting, you only pay for the number of hours worked and the level of expertise. Managed services help enterprises in strategic allocation of costs.
4. Scalability: With different engagement models, enterprises hire the right number of skilled IT resources for a specific project duration. An in-house hire incurs other costs, in addition to salary, such as perks, allowances, incentives, increments etc. As a business grows, an MSP can quickly onboard additional resources to improve scalability, reduce downtime and address other challenges of business growth.
5. Extended Support: A dedicated team of technical experts increases reliability of your business. The MSP has the necessary IT infrastructure enabling small and medium sized enterprises keep pace with technology advancements with higher levels of performance, reliability, and sustainability.
If you wish to be highly resilient, cost effective, and scalable Y-o-Y, managed services are the best strategy for your business. An MSP complements your business enabling your enterprise to minimize risks of maintain sensitive business information and stay ahead of the curve with a well-defined and strategic approach.