Data drives the expansion of modern business. However, as technology evolves rapidly, IT requirements are constantly changing, in addition to the growing security threats to this data and downtimes that can devastate any business. This is where collaborating with a managed service provider comes into play. It not only helps you smooth out different cloud services processes, but it also helps you manage cost and security challenges efficiently and continuously.
Whether your cloud environment is multi-tenant or hybrid. The companies that provide cloud-managed services have the necessary knowledge and infrastructure to manage everything from start to finish. As a result, an increasing number of rapidly growing businesses are partnering with cloud-managed IT service providers. The cloud-managed services market is expected to grow from $27.15 billion in 2017 to $53.78 billion by 2022.
Managed IT services can relieve the burden on your in-house IT staff, allowing your team to focus on strategic growth rather than day-to-day operations. Providers can focus on leveraging the best software solutions for your firm and improving your IT infrastructure to boost productivity across departments with less time spent on mundane tasks like daily service and support.
Additionally, Managed IT services include any information technology service and support provided by a third party using cloud-based software. These information technology solutions frequently offer round-the-clock monitoring of your systems. This is in addition to proactive support and timely troubleshooting and repair services—often before your in-house team is aware of a problem.
Some examples of managed IT support are remote network monitoring and management, managed video conferencing solutions and other collaboration tools, server maintenance, cloud-based storage, virtual machine management, and cybersecurity measures.
Benefits of hiring a managed service provider
Before we get into further detail about why a business needs a managed service provider, let us look at some benefits of acquiring and hiring a managed service provider to scale a business effectively.
First of all, it helps with improved project management. Taking on more projects is part of growing a business. Additional projects necessitate the installation of new servers, construction cabling, contractors, workstations, and additional IT. All these elements are difficult for an in-house IT department to manage. A managed service provider can improve project management so you can focus on growing your business. A managed service provider (MSP) can become the single point of contact you need to more effectively manage an increase in the number of projects. Additionally, you can manage vendor relationships and handle the day-to-day managing of tasks for new projects.
Secondly, as mentioned previously, they can help with increased IT support. Scaling a business entails opening new locations, which may entice you to hire an additional IT support team. Hiring another IT support team requires you to allocate time and resources for recruiting, payroll, overhead, and other costs. Working with a managed service provider can help you save time and money by eliminating the need to hire another IT support team. Your chosen provider will have the IT personnel required to provide a higher level of support as you focus on growing your business. Furthermore, instead of managing a new team, you will only have to deal with a single point of contact (POC) to keep clients informed about the recent locations.
Last but not least, there are reduced costs on future equipment acquisitions. Managing vendor relationships takes time. Fortunately for growing businesses, managed service providers already have equipment vendor relationships, resulting in cost savings for your organization. Firewalls, workstations, servers, switches, and any other piece of IT equipment required to grow and run your business can all be purchased at a discount with the assistance of a managed service provider. Use your newly discovered savings to focus on expanding your business to new heights.
Why you need a managed service provider
Let us now take a deep look and go into more detail about why you need a managed service provider.
As mentioned previously, they are very cost-effective. Maintaining infrastructure and networks in-house can result in significant cost overruns, mainly if you run a small or medium-sized business with limited resources. Essentially, you are spending money on tools that you may or may not need right now to manage your cloud infrastructure. On the other hand, a managed service provider is solely responsible for managing cloud infrastructure for clients. When a company hires a managed service provider, you only pay for what you use and when you use it.
The service provider already has the tools needed to set up cloud infrastructure and the workforce to maintain it. This reduces operational costs, lowers IT expenses, and conserves capital budget. This allows you to focus on business strategy rather than infrastructure planning and management. Another issue that switching to MSPs addresses is the reduction of OpEx spending. Using the Pay-as-you-go model, you can obtain cloud services that do not consume a large portion of your IT budget. This translates into significant cost savings for small and medium-sized businesses.
Secondly, they have a robust infrastructure. The infrastructure required to run networks has many moving parts. For those parts to function smoothly and robustly, several processes must be in place, with continuous funding injections to maintain quality.
Integrating existing business practices into cloud infrastructure is a complex task that MSPs make simple by aligning them with your enterprise goals and enabling a faster Go-To-Market strategy. Sharing network management responsibilities allows you to offload expenses and a slew of infrastructure responsibilities. This leads to even more cost savings. This will enable businesses to diversify and be more agile. Furthermore, managed cloud services offer infrastructure management services 24 hours a day, seven days a week to keep the network infrastructure in good shape. This makes it easy to monitor and scan for security aspects in accordance with standards. Ultimately, this ensures that infrastructure is reliable and operating at peak efficiency.
Thirdly, they help with disaster management and data recovery. For businesses with IT infrastructure on-premise, a disaster or critical server failure can leave them in shambles, negatively impacting their day-to-day business operations. They risk losing essential data to their business processes and overall growth. Maintaining data recovery processes and tools all year round is an additional cost that your company will incur.
If you store all of your data in the cloud, even the most disastrous situation can become just another day at the office. You will have little to no downtime. Given that an hour of downtime costs a small business around $8000 and a large company around $700,000, this is a significant benefit. Even if a host fails, you have backup cloud servers to fall back on. Since everything is hosted on a virtual platform, hardware failure risks are virtually eliminated. This is one of the most important reasons to use cloud-based managed services.
The fourth reason is that they usually provide automatic upgrades. As the IT landscape evolves, a new trend emerges every hour. To keep up with the evolving times and changing requirements and stay on the upward growth curve, you often need to make minor changes and tweaks here and there or go for major upgrades.
Furthermore, on-premise servers are a significant cost burden for businesses. Maintenance and security costs are fixed expenses that organizations must incur for servers to remain operational. An MSP – managed service provider – provides you with the adaptability and scalability to adapt and evolve by customizing existing services or introducing new processes/tools into the existing environment. All of this without interfering with your current business processes.
Managed cloud services providers provide continuous enterprise-level monitoring and scrutiny, not only assisting in the prevention of a problem but also detecting deviations that could otherwise pose security threats and compliance issues. Whether a new requirement emerges or a network issue arises, having a quick response time is critical. With a quick response, a minor anomaly does not escalate into a technological disaster.
Let’s assume you have signed up with a reputable MSP. In that case, you can rest assured that any unexpected development that requires attention will be addressed as soon as possible and with the utmost priority.
Ultimately, a managed service provider (MSP) manages all servers and applications deployed on them through a central data center within the cloud network. This allows remote network users to access the network’s centralized data easily. Furthermore, the cloud enables storage and backup to reside on the same centralized network. This goes a long way towards increasing the availability of your infrastructure.