Managed IT services offer a wide range of remote Hybrid IT , with responsibilities ranging from specific on-demand response to 24/7/365 coverage of IT duties. Organizations can leverage managed IT to reduce in-house IT workload or fill gaps left by existing IT roles and skills. These services are provided for on-premises IT, as well as for private cloud storage.
Managed IT service providers can reduce in-house overhead, increase IT efficiency, and improve uptime management. However, to ensure compliance with national and international regulatory entities, organizations should ensure that potential MSPs properly enforce data protection and privacy standards.
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Managed IT services enable organizations to outsource IT tasks to a vendor as contracted or subscription services. These services can be used to lighten the workload of in-house teams, supplement teams that are unable to meet IT demand, or to replace in-house teams. 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.
Managed IT services can encompass many responsibilities but typically include:
Learn about cloud compliance in our guides: Continuous Data Protection and GDPR Data Protection.
There are numerous benefits that organizations can gain from the right managed IT service provider. These benefits often include:
Managed services enable you to set contractual terms for IT tasks that include service level agreements (SLAs). This means you don’t have to spend time recruiting, hiring, or training IT staff. This enables you to pay only for the coverage or services you need and avoids the associated costs that come with maintaining full-time employees.
Outsourcing IT tasks to managed services can free your teams to focus on revenue-generating tasks. These providers can also often provide guidance or recommendations to help you optimize the performance of your infrastructure. This can lead to increases in productivity and improved ROI.
Managed IT service providers are not tied to the same schedule as your other employees. This means providers are often able to perform system updates and maintenance during off-hours. When MSPs have flexible schedules to work around your own, you see greater uptime and fewer workflow disruptions.
While managed service providers can offer many benefits, there are also some considerations you should be aware of when working with them:
When selecting an IT MSP, there are several steps you can take to ensure that the one you choose fits your needs. Although these steps require some extra effort, careful assessment of your needs, assets, and goals helps ensure that you get the most from any provider you select.
Taking a thorough assessment of your current IT needs and costs is the first step to finding an MSP. You need to understand what infrastructure and workflows you need managed, what resources you currently have, and what your budget is for management. During this assessment, you should also pay attention to what your business goals are.
For example, if you want supplemental support for an existing IT team, the providers you should consider are different than if you want a self-contained team. Additionally, consider whether managed services make sense in the long run. While it may be cheaper at first to contract out IT management and maintenance, as your organization grows it may make more sense to invest in acquiring and training an in-house team.
Once you’ve narrowed down a list of providers, you may want them to perform an audit of your systems. This can help you determine if they have the support and experience needed to manage your assets.
You want to make sure that providers are competent with any specialized hardware or software you are using or intend to use in the future. You should also ensure that they are familiar with any industry or compliance standards that apply to your systems and data. If providers struggle to properly audit your systems it is unlikely that they will be able to support systems effectively.
When assessing potential vendors, pay attention to the capacity of the services they can supply. Providers should be able to scale with you and ideally should have more bandwidth, service hours, and expertise than you need. If they do not, then your provider might become the bottleneck reducing your capacity and performance.
This is particularly important if you are planning big infrastructure changes in the near future. For example, cloud migration. You need to identify a provider that can support any growth your organization goes through without sacrificing performance or coverage.