2020 has undoubtedly been a year we won’t soon forget. From an IT perspective, it has been a year of significant digital transformation. The very core of how many businesses function has taken a dramatic shift. Many organizations have had to scale back on their resources and are struggling to efficiently operate while on a tight budget with stretched and over-worked staff.

This is one example of where the true value of a Managed Services Provider (MSP) comes into play. A firm dealing with the financial consequences of a global pandemic can choose to outsource some of their tasks taking the heavy load off of their own stretched staff and do so comfortably within their budget. With the underlying subscription-based model for managed services, you generally only pay for what you need and for as long as you need it. 

If we can rewind to before the COVID-19 pandemic hit (seems so long ago now, doesn’t it?), people would be freely travelling, going on vacations, business trips. Business owners and managers, especially those managing SMB's, who perhaps have a very small IT team or no in-house IT at all, would certainly want the peace of mind of knowing a trusted, reliable MSP would be looking after all of their IT needs.

Back to the Basics: What Exactly is Managed Services?
At its core, the concept of managed services can be defined as the practice of outsourcing day-to-day IT management responsibilities and functions as a strategic method for improving operations and reduing expenses. By leveraging Managed Services, you can offload specific IT operations to a a qualified MSP who will then oversee the responsibility for monitoring, managing and problem solving of your selected IT systems and functions on your behalf. By offloading day-to-day management of your IT infrastructure to an experienced team of professionals, you can then focus on running your business, implementing growth strategies with your peers, and generally operate much more seamlessly with fewer interruptions due to technical issues.

Why Should Businesses Consider Adopting an MSP?
Organizations of all sizes need their IT infrastructure to run efficiently - and with the rapid growth of data and technology, the necessary resources required to support an increasingly complex IT environment may not be able to scale to meet the needs due to a multitude of reasons. 

Today’s CIOs are often caught between a rock and a hard place. Business priorities change quickly and CIO's often struggle to keep up. The increasing complexity of the IT environment also uses up valuable resources and IT projects can, at times be delayed up to 12-18 months. This is where the help of a qualified and sophisticated team of professionals from a reputable MSP can offer valuale assistance in helping to streamline processes, fill in the any gaps and push projects forward.

Small Businesses Are a Key Candidate
For small businesses, IT resources are typically scarce, and they can be easily overwhelmed with the day-to-day responsibilities of keeping the IT infrastructure up and running. When you fall behind in keeping up with backups, patches or security, the odds are that you’ll face an IT outage or other issues at some point that will negatively impact your business.

The Essence of Outsourcing
By delegating specific IT operations to a managed services provider, you can decide what you want the service model to cover and keep what you are able to handle internally. The MSP should really be viewed as an extension of your existing IT department. Their team will take care of routine IT infrastructure monitoring and management 24/7 that will free up your IT resources to work on higher-value and higher-priority projects. If and when an issue does occur, their job is to have their experienced staff troubleshoot and resolve the problem efficiently.

In summary, trusted and reliable MSP's can help businesses:

• Manage and deploy multi-vendor environments
• Save money
• Focus on strategic applications
• Remain agile
• Reduce business risk. 

To learn more about how an MSP model can work for your organization - especially as we continue to navigate some very challening and unique circumstances -  simply contact us to get a conversation started.