Technology has ingrained itself into just about every facet of modern life, especially in the business world where every competitive edge makes a difference. Many small and medium-sized businesses just don’t have the staff on-hand to manage and maintain their technology solutions, instead opting to outsource this critical responsibility to managed service providers (MSPs).
Macro Systems Blog
For any business to succeed it needs to exhibit some degree of empathy toward its audience. Otherwise, the services and products they provide will be less likely to meet the priorities and needs that its targets are experiencing.
As a managed service provider, this is perhaps most true of us, as our services revolve around predicting the needs of our clientele and resolving them… ideally, before the client even realizes they have a need to fulfill.
Cost/Benefit is a term you hear a lot. It’s always used in conversations about potential investment and means something. Well, at least it should. One of the places that many people can gain benefits from their investments is by outsourcing some of their responsibilities to an outside vendor. This works especially well with IT management. Listed below is a look at why outsourcing your technology support and management is a good investment.
SMBs need to be able to navigate the complexities of IT, whether it’s with a completely outsourced IT department or an in-house team of technicians. That being said, if you are thinking of technology management in this black-and-white way, you are eliminating the potential for significant benefits via the use of co-managed IT.
Business technology is a helpful tool, there’s no way around it. Unfortunately for businesses, technology has to be replaced every so often. Even if the technology doesn’t break, there are innovations made that can help your business do what you do better. The thing is: Technology does break, so you need to understand how to get the most value out of it when it is working.
A basic equation: the more productive a business is, the greater the value that its actions will have. This is just one way that managed services provide a business value, by helping to make its actions more productive. Below is a closer look at productivity and the additional value that managed services offer.
The company that manufactures products is first and foremost interested in efficiency; they need their processes to churn out products, be cost effective, and be repeatable. The goal of IT services for manufacturers is to help facilitate efficient and effective processes beginning with procurement of resources through to the support of the goods.
Outsourcing your IT management or project management is routine for modern businesses, but it wasn’t always. For the first couple of decades of IT for business, outsourcing was the only way you were going to get a piece of technology up and working again without massive capital investment. Below we'll take a look at the break/fix method to IT management and how it is far more expensive than you may be aware of.
If you are a business owner that has been in business for a decade you’ve probably seen how emerging technologies have altered the face of business. Technologies such as cloud computing have created opportunities for many businesses to get the powerful computing infrastructures they need without enormous upfront costs. As this trend continues, the IT services have begun to move past core IT management and support and onto providing real solutions for the modern business. Let's take a look at how the Managed Service Provider (MSP) is at the forefront of a data revolution that has no end in sight.
Imagine your business has experienced significant growth over the past couple of years. It’s not outpacing your IT infrastructure, and the cracks are starting to show in more ways than one. This makes it hard to plan for the future, implement new IT initiatives, and react to issues as they crop up. If your organization doesn’t have an internal IT department watching these developments, outsourcing can be a viable option to make sure all of your organizations technological needs keep your progress moving forward.
Your critical business systems are malfunctioning and you don't know exactly what’s causing the problem. Luckily, you aren’t caught up in this alone. There are people that can help you, just like a doctor would help you if you were ill. Nonetheless, instead of calling your healthcare provider, you want to call a managed services provider, or 'MSP'.
There is a chance that you view your vendors as a necessary evil. While you have to work with them to get the software or tools that your organization needs to function, it’s difficult to not think of everything else that could be accomplished in the time you spend dealing with them. Alas, there are even more costs to dealing with vendors that you may not have considered.
The traditional break-fix IT model has given way to a more comprehensive and hands-off approach called managed IT. Managing technology solutions can be difficult, but it doesn’t have to be. With the right combination of outsourced IT services, your business can take advantage of enterprise-level solutions without dealing with the expensive costs and extensive resources required to do so. Here are four of the many ideal ways that you can leverage managed IT services for your business.
The purpose of an internal IT department is, in theory, twofold: first, they are supposed to strategize a future for the company’s information technology, with the secondary responsibility of troubleshooting and tending to the technological issues a business faces. However, the reality is that many IT departments find themselves with no time to innovate, as they are swamped under service requests for technical issues.
Project implementation is a tricky subject for small businesses to approach primarily due to a lack of funding or dedicated personnel. Nowhere is this more true than for technology project implementation, be it a new email server or a revamped networking infrastructure. Depending on your business’ specific situation, it’s often more convenient to simply invest in outsourcing the project management to a third party.
You may have just learned of outsourced IT services, but you may be surprised to hear that they have been around for far longer than you previously thought. Even before managed IT, however, business owners and individuals alike were using the outsourced services of others to simplify operations and day-to-day tasks related to their technology management.
IT is meant to help your business function more efficiently, not impede operations. This is the cornerstone of the way that most businesses need to think about technology maintenance. Unfortunately, there are some businesses that either don’t have dedicated IT support, or waste valuable time and resources working with break-fix providers who don’t have their organization’s best interests in mind. To keep your organization from falling victim to these practices, you should consider managed IT for your technology maintenance.