Having a reliable IT infrastructure is critical for business owners like you who are looking to optimize productivity and processes. Whether you are a small business or large business, for-profit or not-for-profit, the can be great benefits from leveraging a managed service provider. Where do you start though?
Choosing between in-house IT or leveraging the expertise of a Managed Service Provider (MSP) is not an easy decision to come to. There are so many factors to consider. While in-house IT allows you always to have resources on-site, it can be limited to the time and money you can divert to IT and by the expertise of the staff you have hired. Managed Services provide the benefit of managing the expertise and keeping the costs down.
Why You Need a Managed Service Provider
By leveraging the experience, expertise, resources, and capabilities of a Managed Service Provider (MSP), your company can confidently ensure that its IT environment and technology will effectively support its business goals. Many companies face a critical decision: should they maintain an in-house IT department or engage a managed IT services provider?
This decision can be challenging, as businesses seek to balance personalized service, technical innovation, and efficiency while keeping costs manageable.
Benefits of Managed IT Services
Understanding the need for an IT services provider lies in recognizing the benefits they bring to your business and how they support your goals. Cost savings, along with leveraging expertise in areas like cloud computing, network infrastructure, and support services, are key factors in this decision. Here are the top twelve reasons why you need managed IT services.
1. Save Money
Employing a full-time technician or maintaining an internal IT department incurs significant costs, including salary, benefits, training, and coverage during absences, not to mention the expenses related to hiring due to turnover. By using an IT service provider, you can reduce and control operating costs while benefiting from the provider’s expertise. A managed service provider offers consistent service without the additional costs of maintaining key personnel.
In some cases, you may not even have enough work to keep a full-time employee busy week over week. Leveraging a managed service provider means your money is being spent on what you need – not what you don’t need.
Moreover, with a managed IT provider, your business can minimize high capital expenditures and enjoy predictable operating expenses. This stable monthly budget is negotiated with the IT service provider, with any additional costs discussed beforehand. As a result, IT expenses become a manageable and transparent aspect of your budget. Managed service providers like Blackbelt offer fixed monthly fees that cover all costs to manage and optimize your business IT environment.
2. Save Time
Using a managed service provider allows you to focus your attention on business goals and actually running your business. As a managed IT provider, we can take 100% control of your IT environment. For you this means you get to redirect your attention from fighting technology fires and can focus the IT Department on helping achieve your goals. A managed service provider becomes the expert – ensuring your technology needs are met and that technology continually helps propel your business forward.
3. Improved Reliability
Your MSP monitors your systems to help predict failures and disasters before they start. Using the most advanced tools available, they analyze all of that data. This allows them to stay ahead of the failures and to advise you when a repair needs to occur. With the MSP being on top of it, you can rest easy knowing your systems are ready for you – when you need them.
4. Streamlined Productivity
MSPs are committed to ensuring business continuity and efficiency, placing productivity at the heart of the IT environment. With an MSP, you experience minimal network downtime and robust data protection, ensuring quick access to important information during network outages. Additionally, MSPs offer 24/7 on-call support to address and resolve issues promptly, keeping your business running smoothly.
A key aspect of an MSP’s service is their proactive approach to IT. Rather than reacting to problems as they occur, proactive MSPs like Blackbelt identify and resolve issues before they impact your business, streamlining productivity and preventing disruptions.
5. Secure Data
Data is a critical asset for all businesses today. If used properly it can mean the difference of an extra zero at the end of your revenue line – making its protection paramount. By using an MSP, cybersecurity is seamlessly integrated into your IT environment. MSPs can implement and maintain the latest IT security technologies to ensure your business remains safe.
An MSP is usually more in tune with current cyber threats than in-house staff – because its what people pay us to do. In-house staff rarely have the time to be abreast of the threat of the day – but we are.
6. Access to Cutting Edge Technology
Working with an IT organization guarantees technological innovation, as these experts are dedicated to staying at the forefront of the industry. By continuously engaging with cutting-edge information, their technicians ensure that clients benefit from the latest and most effective technologies. Additionally, clients are not burdened with the costs of training their employees on these advanced systems internally.
7. Understand Your Entire IT Ecosystem
It’s crucial to maintain an inventory of your infrastructure to ensure that hardware and software are serving your company effectively. By capturing information about your environment, the MSP can better understand the limits and capabilities therein. As an example, outdated technology leads to decreased productivity and increased security vulnerabilities. This would be captured in the documentation thus helping to optimize your IT environment and ensuring continuous improvement over the years. It also helps make problems much easier to solve.
A good MSP will document everything about the environment,
8. Expert Management
With an MSP, your IT environment is managed by experts who possess the specialized skills needed to fully optimize your infrastructure and applications. In today’s digitized business landscape, this expertise is essential and would be costly to develop in-house.
These experts are held to high accountability standards through Service Level Agreements (SLAs). SLAs ensure a commitment to service excellence, outlining and enforcing performance standards. On-site and behind-the-scenes technical experts guarantee a high level of technological proficiency. Should these standards not be met, the contractual obligations in the SLA clearly define the consequences and necessary measures.
9. Improved Vendor Management
Your business benefits from the relationships MSPs have with software and hardware vendors. Procurement services allow for bulk purchasing and leasing options, saving you the time and effort of sourcing the best vendors and suppliers. These established relationships ensure you receive the best value in the market by leveraging the IT service provider’s buying power with manufacturers. Leveraging these vendor relationships is a key reason to use managed IT services, as it is crucial for obtaining cutting-edge technology at the best possible value.
10. Increased ROI and Reduced Risk
With an IT provider, your company gains access to the collective expertise of a team of IT professionals with specific qualifications, industry training, and up-to-date certifications. You can rely on multiple dedicated resources with superior technical skills and experience, who apply industry best practices to solve your IT challenges.
Managed service providers, staying ahead of technology policies, also offer early notifications of government regulatory compliance requirements. For example, an organization might need a VMWare expert for only twenty hours a year. Hiring such specialists in-house can be costly and challenging. With Blackbelt, you have access to these experts whenever needed, often included in your existing monthly service cost.
11. Customized Solutions for Your Business
Managed IT providers can objectively analyze your business to determine how technology can best serve your goals. They assess which solutions offer the greatest productivity at the lowest cost over a fixed term. Using a managed service provider goes beyond an ad-hoc, break-fix approach to technology, where the focus is merely on fixing a printer or rebooting a computer. Instead, the relationship becomes about leveraging IT strategically to achieve business objectives and enhance productivity.
12. Scale Your Operations
As technology experts, IT organizations understand customer needs and develop tailored services to meet them. For instance, Blackbelt created the Blackbelt Atmosphere, recognizing that small and medium businesses required a cloud computing solution suited to their operations.
The desire to transition from on-site physical servers to a comfortable cloud computing environment motivated the development of Blackbelt’s cloud offering. Additionally, MSPs like Blackbelt provide access to services typically unavailable on a small scale, such as two-factor authentication and dashboard monitoring, further enhancing their managed IT services.
Are Managed Services Right for Your Business?
Weighing the benefits of managed IT services against maintaining an internal IT department is a crucial decision. With the rise of cybersecurity attacks, increasing technological complexity, and the ongoing digital transformation, securing a reliable technology partner is essential. It’s important to ensure your technology needs are prioritized and aligned with your business goals.
At Blackbelt, we are dedicated to understanding our clients’ IT challenges and their impact on business operations. Our approach is both personal and proactive, allowing us to quickly develop solutions that optimize your business processes when issues arise.
Contact us to learn more about our Managed IT Services and how they can benefit your enterprise.