Small businesses today rely heavily on technology to operate efficiently for effective competitiveness. However, even as the reliance on IT grows, it may be difficult to get all the resources to support an increasingly complex IT environment. Resources may be scarce and your own internal IT capabilities may quickly become overwhelmed by the day-to-day responsibilities of keeping your IT infrastructure running.
Fortunately, small business owners have the option of working with Managed Service Providers (MSPs). These assume the ongoing responsibilities of monitoring, managing or problem solution for selected IT solutions on your behalf. As such, you get to offload some of the demanding IT operations to the managed services provider. This could range from the most basic services, including monitoring your systems and notifying you of any problems that you would fix on your own, to more fully managed services including problem resolution, and even provide customer support onsite when needed.
Consistent IT management
For many companies, falling behind in keeping up with things such as backups, patches and security is a common phenomenon that leaves them at risk of IT outages or other problems that could negatively impact the business. With managed services, routine monitoring of IT infrastructure is performed consistently and your staff is left free to focus on more important projects. This proactive monitoring and maintenance of your systems could help you avoid a lot of technology problems and should they occur, an experienced MSP can resolve it more efficiently.
Improving your odds
It is worth noting that while managed services can perform automated tasks, even the most efficient preventative maintenance may not be able to completely prevent database corruption, hardware failures, software crashes and some virus or spyware intrusions. The main purpose of managed services is to shift the odds against such failures to a less risky position. This means that in case a failure does occur, there will be verified and current backups on standby, an inventory of the systems for referencing, and repair time and data loss would be limited.
Flexibility
MSPs usually price their services on a subscription basis that is determined by factors such as the services required and the number of devices. Different packages are priced at different levels. An initial assessment may be performed for your current IT management requirements to help you decide the services or service levels that you need. In contrast to traditional outsourcing in which complete control of your IT assets was surrendered, managed services allow you to decide what you want the service provider to handle on your behalf.
If you’d like to learn more about managed services and how Landon Technologies, Inc. can help your business, give us a call.
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