The Top 5 Benefits of Managed Services
The Burwood Managed Services (BMS) Management Portal.
With 67% of organizations turning to an MSP, what are the benefits of a managed service provider?
Why Managed Services?
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The “new normal” of the virtual, hybrid work landscape has introduced new challenges for enterprise leaders. As your infrastructure complexity increases and cloud footprint expands, so do expectations from the business: executives expect IT teams to not only support, but drive innovation with technology. Meanwhile, it’s getting harder and harder to find and retain in-house, skilled IT professionals— especially with the economic uncertainties of today.
With so many demands on their time, it’s no wonder that IT leaders are turning to outsourcing. A managed service provider (MSP) can help alleviate the day-to-day workload and give your IT team time to focus on more important projects, while providing you with foundational 24x7 monitoring and management for your IT infrastructure.
But an ideal MSP partnership looks beyond day-to-day tasks. Over time, your MSP should help you improve core operational and process challenges. Their expertise, combined with knowledge of your specific environment, helps them to recommend cost-effective IT solutions with a good long-term return on investment.
The 5 Biggest Benefits of Managed IT Services
The prospect of selecting a managed service provider might sound like a lot of work, and transferring your system knowledge and tooling to a third party vendor can sound overwhelming. So why should you consider outsourcing?
It’s true that your in-house team may be capable of keeping all systems running and fighting fires as needed. But there are big benefits to taking these responsibilities off their to-do lists:
1. A More Productive IT Team
Your network and infrastructure demand attention all day and night—and holidays and weekends, and possibly across multiple international time zones, too. Expecting your IT department to provide around-the-clock coverage carries hidden costs in the form of lost time for other projects.
Managed Services and Scalability
As your business grows, so will the demand for IT resources. Having a managed services provider on contract can help you scale to accommodate new requests, or scale down when resources are no longer needed. This added layer of monitoring and management also gives you enhanced visibility to watch your resourcing trends and predict growth patterns.
Strategic initiatives, technology adoption and future growth projects will be pushed aside. This can lead to burnout and high turnover as employees depart for more fulfilling or challenging opportunities. Even with a great human resources and recruiting team, IT jobs are challenging to fill.
A trusted managed services partner can ensure coverage while your employees carry a balanced workload. Reducing stress and opening up opportunities for more strategic work translates directly into cost savings in the form of improved employee engagement and retention.
2. You Get Ahead of Issues Before They Get Out of Hand
In an era of scarce IT talent, many in-house teams have little time to do more than react to a growing volume of user tickets. In contrast, a qualified managed services provider will take a proactive approach with comprehensive monitoring for abnormalities, issues, and more. This approach can help improve the end-user experience.
They can also handle time consuming activities like patching and vendor management, creating a more stable environment and freeing your people for higher-level priorities and innovation. For example, vendor management for SD-WAN infrastructure can require extra cycles due to carrier relations and contract management. Burwood’s SD-WAN as a Service offering includes carrier relationship management, saving your team from endless phone calls and negotiations.
3. Predictable OpEx Cost
One of the biggest benefits of managed services is the predictable spend. MSPs provide services for a fixed monthly or annual cost, depending on the levels of service you select. Pricing is often determined based on the length of your contract (one to three years is a typical duration). A good MSP partner will be completely transparent about the services they will provide and the associated deliverables. This payment structure results in two key benefits to your organization and finance team:
Case Study: AllianceChicago
When a large healthcare organization needed to improve the uptime of an integrated electronic health record (EHR) platform for its extensive healthcare network, it looked to Burwood to help ensure the availability of its underlying infrastructure.
It eliminates an upfront capital expenditure, enabling you to avoid costly infrastructure purchases and spread costs out over the time in which you are using the service. For example, instead of buying a best-in-class network monitoring tool, engage an MSP that gives you access on a monthly basis.
It helps your finance team forecast operational costs months in advance. The fixed fee nature of a managed services support contract enables you to negotiate nearly all the services and support you’ll require into a single predictable cost per month. Finance will get predictability, and you’ll get the backfill support you need.
If reducing capital expenditures is very important to your business, you should think beyond managed IT services and look for providers that offer As A Service (aaS) solutions, such as Unified Communications as a Service, SD-WANaaS, and even dedicated MSP resources to work as an extension of your IT staff. Most MSPs will amortize the cost of the infrastructure over the length of the contract, giving you a fixed monthly bill that includes all costs.
4. Access to Premium Tools Without the Cost of Ownership
Let’s face it—robust infrastructure monitoring solutions are expensive and are often underutilized because of lack of training, time, or personnel. Many IT teams invest in best-in-class tooling with the best intentions. However, these tools require integration, training and time to get value out of the investment. When other responsibilities arise, tooling ramp-up falls to the bottom of the list.
A good managed services provider assumes the cost of acquiring the most effective infrastructure tools and provides highly experienced talent to deploy and maintain them on your behalf. When you direct your IT budget toward an MSP, that should include access to a tooling suite that works for your infrastructure.
5. Continuity and Institutional Knowledge of Your Operations
With the increasing upkeep on daily tasks and tickets to maintain, changes and upgrades may be initiated ad-hoc and left undocumented. When an engineer leaves, a knowledge gap occurs, leaving you unsure about the details of the environment. A reliable managed services provider will implement standard procedures and will document your environment and changes along the way, ensuring continuity.
Your IT Team Should Work Smarter, Not Harder
From server builds to exhaustive maintenance: managing the daily needs of an IT infrastructure environment is hard work. But is it smart work?
If you're looking for a qualified provider to help evaluate your current-state or provide perspective on tooling, Burwood Group may be able to help. Get in touch with our team to learn more.
