What Are the Benefits of a Managed Service Provider?

In the past year, the pace of change in the IT sector has challenged many businesses to rethink their IT departments. 

Advancements in technology, widespread adoption of remote working, and the increasing dependency on digital services has presented many opportunities for development. The constantly evolving digital environment has challenged internal IT teams, who often lack the time, resources, and expertise to properly manage a dispersed workforce. 

This is where a managed service provider (MSP) can help.

Instead of expending resources on internal IT, additional staff, or extra hardware, a managed service provider can manage your cloud services, host your data centre, facilitate mobiles, and manage your collaboration and security solutions remotely. This means internal teams can get back to focusing on priorities such as managing staff, providing training, and troubleshooting. 

The Benefits of a Managed Service Provider (MSP)

It's estimated that managed services can cut IT costs by as much as 40% and double operational efficiency across a typical business. But cost savings aren't the only advantage. Managed service providers take a holistic approach to IT services, offering ongoing management and maintenance of infrastructure, network monitoring, end-user support, and service guarantees. 

In the future, we expect demand for 24/7 managed support to continue to grow. For businesses with limited in-house capacity, managed support can help ensure sustained growth without the need for additional investment. 

With managed support, businesses can:

• Free up internal teams and recover resources
• Scale up and down services where required
• Reduce IT costs 

Here are some of the key benefits of enlisting the help of a managed service provider. 

Your IT Staff Get Their Time Back

It’s highly likely that your IT department has a lot of staff to manage, hardware to maintain, and software to service at any given time. And as your business continues to grow, this can put increasing amounts of pressure on overworked internal IT teams. 

By outsourcing some of the maintenance tasks or more complex high-cost projects to a managed service provider, your in-house IT teams can recapture their time and resources. This means they can focus on innovative solutions that address your core business needs, without being overwhelmed by day-to-day requests.

Scalability

New businesses that are looking to expand their business to fit the needs of a new market, are often held back by their lack of technical know-how, preventing them from keeping pace with their customers’ needs. As your technology needs evolve over time, you’ll need to scale your system either up or down to accommodate them. 

With the help of a managed service provider, they can take on the task of scaling their business up or down according to your demands. Whether that takes the shape of a swift infrastructure expansion project, additional cloud services, or reduced network capacity, a MSP will be able to make changes quickly, so you'll never have to worry about system downtime. 

Around the Clock Support

We’re the ‘now’ generation, which means when something is broken, we don’t expect to have to wait for ‘office hours’ to get up and running again.

A managed service provider can offer network monitoring functions 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. So if your systems suffer an interruption, there will be someone to resolve or escalate the issue, whatever the time of day.

Manageable Monthly Costs

From a cost perspective, a continuous benefit of partnering with a managed service provider is the reduced labor costs from eliminating the need to hire and train new IT staff.

Plus, by signing a service-level agreement that’s tailored to your businesses specific needs, you’ll never have to worry about unexpected service costs. So you'll have access to all the expertise, support, and monitoring you need, with one manageable monthly payment. 

The Future of Managed Services

The right managed service provider can help businesses overcome the complex challenges of a new digital world. From managing complex infrastructure, to providing around the clock monitoring, they can offer the expertise to help organisations approach  future demands with confidence. 

In our recent webinar The Big WFH Experiment: Is Your IT Ready? Intercity’s own Mike Osborne, David Owen, and Geraint Talbot-Davies discuss how to meet the IT demands of the new working world. They cover the challenges and opportunities for businesses and how managed services is the key for supporting a newly remote workforce. 

To learn more about how managed services can help your business overcome future demands, download our webinar today for free.