The innovation of IT is getting faster with every second passing, making inventions and innovations for any person or team difficult to track and understand. It is a monumental task for a single IT professional or even a small in-house staff to keep up with the rapidly changing and increasingly complex IT industry. This is why companies are inclined not to rely on their in-house IT teams alone because the cost of acquiring knowledge and tools can be too costly.
Malicious actors and hackers have continued to exploit businesses’ struggle with keeping up with the innovation in the cybersecurity space. This is why it is not farfetched to find why an enterprise’s IT team partners with MSPs (managed service providers). However, before we dive deep into the benefits of an IT team partnering with MSPs, let’s look at what they are.
What Is a Managed Service Provider?
Managed service providers are IT consulting firms that handle the outsourcing needs of small, medium and large companies for services like applications, cybersecurity and infrastructure. Services offered by MSPs depend on their expertise, available tools and the commonly available market demand for that service.
The demand for MSPs grew as more small and medium businesses began digitizing their operation and processes but lacked the resources to maintain them. And the market is on the rise due to increased cyber insecurity issues, with each organization experiencing over 1130 weekly attacks in 2022.
Common services managed by MSPs include, but are not limited to:
- Networking and infrastructure
- Security (firewalls, intrusion detection, malware, etc.)
- Support services and IT consulting
- Cloud infrastructure
- Software as a Service (SaaS) and Backup as a Service
- Communication services
- Data analytics
- Disaster Planning/Business Continuity
With MSPs, small businesses can improve their chances of surviving and scaling their operations. Here are five reasons why the IT team should partner with an MSP.
1. Unlimited Access to Expert Opinions and Guidance
With limited knowledge of new technological changes, teams cannot function optimally at the level of security demanded of them — especially as the costs of insufficient experience continue to increase. Companies sometimes hire new IT team members to complement the expertise of the existing employees.
Aside from the costs of hiring, training and adapting new IT staff to your business operations, finding the right match for the job can take time and effort. Plus, is hiring a new IT staff every time businesses hit a dead end really the way?
This is one of the several benefits of working with an MSP, business owners can access IT experts in the areas they are lacking. The working arrangement and the objectives of partnering with an MSP determine their role — it could be advisory or technical.
2. Round-the-Clock IT Support With Limited Downtimes
MSPs excel at being available whenever needed and flexible with an organization’s working model and time zone. Traditional working IT staff cannot offer companies the same level of support as MSPs, which can be bad for businesses that operate in multiple time zones and locations. While 24/7 support attracts additional costs, a company needs contingency plans and support systems in emergencies.
Because of the increased support offered by MSPs, downtimes are eliminated because the supporting MSP remedies the situation before it becomes noticeable. And if the servers experience downtime, their emergency protocol kicks in to mitigate losses faster than the average IT team can react. Zero downtimes equal improved customer and employee experiences with your digital processes and products.
3. Improves Focus on Business Administration Objectives
The amount of time company owners and executives focus on administrative duties can be loosely related to the success they enjoy in their businesses. And with business heads having more factors to consider, like the increasing security and resources required to successfully run an IT system, business goals get less attention.
MSPs absolve organizations of their IT worries and allow different internal teams to focus on more business-related and rewarding tasks.
Due to the concentrated efforts of all teams, companies can now amplify the output of their existing IT structure.
4. Improved Cybersecurity Compliance
Each industry has its unique cybersecurity compliance standards. The higher the risks and cyber threats an industry faces, the higher the compliance standards.
The criteria can be rigorous for any one internal IT team to achieve, with each protocol component needing an expert’s attention and adding a sizable workload to the preexisting ones. As a result, industry policies, procedures and compliances are more straightforward and sooner achieved when in partnership with an MSP than alone.
5. Cost-Efficiency, Fixed Fee and High Return on Investment
The costs of hiring or training new IT recruits are high, with the average cost of hiring, onboarding and training in the United States projected to be over $4,000. Spending that high on every new IT hire becomes unjustifiable when companies compare the costs of employing an in-house expert versus how much their activities generate.
MSPs offer a much more sustainable pricing system for companies. This is because they only charge business fixed fees on a per-usage basis, making it a cheaper and leverageable option due to its better effective costs per service rendered.
Since MSP partnership contracts are typically on the premise that they offer continuous value to the hiring firm, they offer the advantage of continuously finding ways to better a company’s operations. This could be through building a business’s working IT model to be more reliable or adopting more efficient methods.
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