Are you still relying on your in-house IT team while maintaining your systems? If you are, it is high time you changed.
Technology has taken leaps and bounds since those days when IT got fixed by the internal team. The truth is – most of the internal IT services don’t have the skill to keep up with the innovation’s pace. Hence, many organizations find that their IT has gone rather reactive than proactive and that their systems are in a constant struggle to keep up with the demands that a growing business comes up within the digital world.
In case you ever shied away from the idea of outsourcing support to a third party thinking your existing IT infrastructure is fine owing to the concerns of cost, it’s the time you’re reconsidered. Managed IT services providers come with numerous benefits, especially if you have been using Microsoft Dynamics 365.
Understanding Managed Services
Before we get into outsourcing to managed services, we could try understanding the basics. By the term Managed IT Services, we refer to the practice where we outsource our business plus responsibilities of management to some third-party vendor. The best part is this definition isn’t specific to just IT, because managed services can envelop anything and everything from supply chain management to the strategies in marketing to call center operations.
The recent years have experienced exponential growth in managed services. The value placed of the global market on managed services was at $ 185.98 in the year 2019 and the projection is to reach $356.24 by the year 2025. The increase in demand could largely be attributed towards small and medium businesses or enterprises (SMEs), who need access to the latest technology so that they can maintain a competitive stance towards their markets to sustain their continuous growth yet lack the IT budget towards meeting their targets. The best news is that managed IT services enable the SMEs to move around in the same level as the middle market along with enterprise-level businesses, without at all overextending themselves – this however is merely one of the numerous benefits of the model of managed services.
Core objective focus
As you gradually grow your business, your IT will also need to grow parallel. Your team of IT may have the ability to handle certainly increased workload, however, would rather likely find themselves overwhelmed also unable of scaling according to the needs of the business, somehow forcing you to assign further responsibilities. This is especially to the employees who are not on the IT team, which could distract from the objectives of the core business.
One of the major benefits of managed IT services lies in the fact that it does not just free up the time of your employees so that they could focus on the jobs they were hired in doing, it also enables your business to fill in the gaps as required. A qualified partner in managed services would offer a flexible model that would allow you to understand which service level you need, whether that would mean merely keeping the lights on or would outsource your entire IT unit.
Receive your required expertise
New technology would entail newer problems, those problems that your existing IT members don’t possess the experience or knowledge to solve. Then there remain issues of managing, irrespective of whether your systems exist in the cloud or on a premise, you would need a significant figure of resources to support your business solutions, which could be an issue in case your IT team is small.
Both problems could be solved through recruiting newer team members, yet the cost of hiring plus training new staff could be enormous. The study says, more than $1886 is spent per employee training alone. Moreover, there are shortages in ongoing IT talent. There are some Managed Service Providers (MSPs) that even take a shared stance towards managed services, signifying you could add or even remove specialists from your team as per need based on the requirements of the project.
Keeping marginal costs
From the price viewpoint, one of the distinct benefits of hiring managed services is that it would bring down the labor costs also eliminate the cost of hiring plus training newer IT staff. The capacity to possess skills available that could be scaled is highly compelling, and maximum MSPs will offer a hybrid skill that is available on a scalable basis. This is highly compelling also most of the MSPs offer one hybrid model of resources from onshore and offshore that lowers the average rate of effectiveness also widens your resource base.
The best thing is, as you have an agreement that is service level that is tailored to the unique needs of your organization, you would never need to worry regarding the unexpected service expenses. This would enable your organization to shift from that of a capital expense model to that of an operating model on expenses. You need to look for an MSP that comes with a solid strategic relationship with your cloud provider or solutions provider for further savings and they would be able to advocate on behalf of you, hence you could reinvest the money you could save back in your business.
Scale down or up as required
As you would need your technology to evolve over time, you would need to scale your systems either down or up to accommodate the technology. Fortunately, systems like that of Dynamics 365 remain crucially scalable by design, yet you might still require extra assistance. MSPs could respond to changes in real-time in demand so that you would never need to bother regarding system downtime.
Make sure you look for an MSP that not just comes with hundreds of consultants (and brings on more numbers as required), but also offers advanced services like proactive monitoring, release management of upgraded services, reporting, also more to receive the greatest scalability and value out of the partnership.
To Sum Up
There are several qualities of managed services, we have chalked out only four of them. So, let us check some of the ideal qualities of ideal MSP:
- Offer one flexible service structure/model
- Take one shared approach towards managed services
- Possess a sturdy strategic relationship with either your cloud providers or solutions
- Have many consultants available
- Offer advanced services
- Multiple time zones support
- Give you round-the-clock support
- Use remote management and monitoring for gaining proactive maintenance
- Have a sturdy disaster recovery and backup strategy
- Gather a solid reliable, one point of contact that is exclusive to your business
- Have one established escalation path also provide secondary contact
- Work with your legal team so that you could address the compliance issues
Finally, if your Managed Security Solutions Providers can meet all these requirements, you could remain assured that your systems are in great hands. Welcome to the world of managed security services and enhance your IT functions by outsourcing it to the best service provider, while you focus on the rest of your core business functionality.
