Friday, January 25, 2019

Why You Should Consider a Managed IT Services Provider

Optimize IT Service Delivery Without Breaking the Bank

By: Sarah Warsi   Categories:Thought Leadership, Managed Services

Why You Should Consider a Managed IT Services Provider

As technology continues to evolve and with the integration of AI frameworks, the complexity of managing a businesses’ IT infrastructure has significantly increased. Facing this reality, one of the biggest challenges many businesses face is the proper management of their IT environment to ensure smooth and seamless operations. 


Staying ahead of the curve

The success factors for every business are different. However, choosing the right technology and managing it effectively will have a huge impact on business growth, IT infrastructure expenses and overall productivity internally and externally. Information technology is the only technology that can provide the opportunity to analyse data and plan your business journey accordingly. It also provides you a plethora of tools that can solve complex problems and plan the future growth of your business.

Overcoming today’s biggest challenges

Ask yourself: What are the challenges that keep you awake at night?

IT Complexity: Do you have a wide variety of servers, storage, virtualization, network, security and applications that need to me administered, managed and maintained?
Limited resources: Do you have limited staff managing the infrastructure and applications that runs the business? Are you mostly reactive vs. proactive?
Lack of resources for strategic work: Is your IT team so busy that they cannot make time to evaluate new features or functionality that can help the business grow?

The solution: Managed Services
To understand how Managed IT Services can help you deal with your challenges, you need to understand the value and the benefits such as cost savings, higher productivity, scalability, and enhanced security.

Top reasons why you should consider Managed Services:

1. Predictable monthly costs
Pay-as-you-go isn’t the only pricing model for managed services, but pricing, in general, is typically the thing that makes the model attractive. Many organizations have been looking to migrate from a capex model of IT purchasing and management to an opex model that fuels more predictability in costs and greater insights for accurate budgeting and forecasting. Other types of pricing include a flat monthly fee based on the size and scope of your IT network, or monthly pricing by number of users or devices being managed. At the start of a mandate, we recommend an upfront assessment to get a clear picture of needs and evaluate accurate costs based on requirements and scalability needs.

What drives to migrate from traditional inhouse management of IT infrastructure to a managed services model is the need to reduce capex and deliver better services. Businesses that migrate from managing their own infrastructure to an MSP model typically find they can substantially reduce their total IT infrastructure costs.

2. With more up-time, you’ll get higher productivity
Your Managed Services Provider will monitor your network 24/7/365 and if a problem arises, you will be notified immediately. This is feature with tremendous value because the earlier an issue is flagged, the earlier it can be resolved. With 24/7 monitoring, most issues can be proactively resolved before they become huge problems that can result in considerable and costly downtime.

3. More strategic than in-house IT
Managed IT Services are a very cost effective method to manage your infrastructure. This will benefit your business by allocating in-house IT staff to work on more strategic projects that can contribute to your bottom line. If you have a small business, your needs can be covered more effectively by a service rather than costly in house staff that require many skill sets and levels of expertise. You need to consider an MSP as an extension of your team that will handle all of your IT needs, either on site or virtually.

4. The ability to scale
Consider your MSP as an extension of your team - available to help solve your IT problems as they arise, whether big or small. If you add cloud services to the mix, you can also scale up and down to align with your business requirements which is especially interesting when demand fluctuates. This is where the pay-as-you-go feature works best to adapt to flexible work loads.

5. Improved security
You may feel resistance towards using an MSP to manage data security but the model has proven results in actually providing better security than in-house teams because they have the resources and knowledge needed in order to adequately manage and monitor your systems. The reason is simple. In most cases a service provider has more and better security expertise on staff than you do.


What are the risks associated with inadequate IT Support?

 - Costly and more expensive downtime
 - Productivity Loss
 - Increased operating costs
 - Increased data and security risks
 - Business continuity loss
 - Technology fragmentation

The Emergence of the Modern IT Leader

Modern IT leaders manage their business with the same data-driven accuracy, financial transparency, and process discipline as their corporate peers in sales, manufacturing, marketing, human resources, and finance. They depend on reliable services and solutions to manage their portfolio of applications, infrastructure, and ultimately to attain long-lasting end-user satisfaction. That's why having a solid system in place that fully manages and supports your under-lying IT environment is so critical to attaining long-term growth and success.

Why Sentia for your Managed Services?

At Sentia, we are proud to be a trusted, reliable managed services provider. We come to you with years of industry experience and numerous success stories that attest to our value and commitment to our customers. For us, it's not about a single project, but a lasting relationship.

For more information or to have a further discussion, visit our managed services page here:

Sarah Warsi
Sarah Warsi

Sarah Warsi

As marketing manager, Sarah plays a key role in managing Sentia's marketing efforts including developing the overall marketing strategy and direction, digital and social media management, to campaign development and execution.

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Full biography

As marketing manager, Sarah plays a key role in managing Sentia's marketing efforts including developing the overall marketing strategy and direction, digital and social media management, to campaign development and execution. She holds a degree in Journalism from Ryerson University.

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