There are 3 primary ways a company can use an MSP, and it is generally related to the business size:
- For smaller or newer businesses without an IT professional, enlisting an MSP can better position your business for growth and productivity.
- For more established businesses that have a full time IT employee, switching to an MSP can have the unique ability to both lower costs and increase coverage, capabilities, and resources.
- For mid-sized companies with a professional IT team, adding an MSP gives them access to experts in defined fields, additional resources for scaling projects, and additional depth in monitoring and IT automation.
Regardless of the size of the company, some inherent advantages come with enlisting an MSP to improve your business:
- An MSP never calls in sick or takes a vacation: An MSP is typically made up of a group of technical professionals that cross-train. As such, when one of the individuals is out, others step up and fill in for them while they are gone, so you never have gaps in support or coverage.
- An MSP is available for continuous support: Granted this may only apply to the larger MSPs, but they are available around the clock for extended support when needed; they do not have to end their day at 8 or even 12 hours. There are instances in disaster recovery scenarios where we had techs on site for 72 hours continuously, rotating between techs as needed.
- An MSP gives you access to content experts: MSPs, especially larger ones, typically have experts in defined fields such as Backup/Disaster Recovery/Business Continuity, Virtualization, Storage, Networking, Security, Cloud components, etc. By leveraging their skills, you can immediately and effectively implement a new system, instead of having to go through the growing pains of learning a new system.
- An MSP has experience in alternative solutions: MSPs generally have a much wider and deeper knowledge of different ways of attacking a problem. By engaging them to help find a solution to a business problem, you have a much higher chance of implementing a successful project that will show immediate benefits.
- An MSP allows you to scale faster: By their nature, MSPs have a pool of techs. Therefore, when you have a project that requires additional staff to quickly implement, an MSP can do that for you. If that MSP already has experience with your network, they can implement much faster, with much less chance of unexpected side effects.
- An MSP can save you money: The cost of having an MSP is generally a fraction of the cost of retaining and developing the same capabilities in-house.
- An MSP can make you more efficient: With effective monitoring, proactive network management, and skilled implementation of an MSP, your business can operate with much high productivity and efficiency, allowing you to get more done with less staff. It is not unusual for the increased profitability to be more than the cost of the MSP you hired, creating a win for everyone.
Moreover, for advanced MSPs, there are additional benefits:
- An Advanced MSP can drastically reduce your support needs: By using a proactive verification of best practices, an advanced MSP can solve problems before they happen. Having a fast support department is great, but nothing is faster than not having the problem in the first place. This not only reduces your IT surprises and support needs, but saves your staff the time of having to report and work with a support tech to fix issues that arise.
- An Advanced MSP can help you maximize your IT spend: By getting to know your business processes and objectives, an advanced MSP can make sure all IT projects and investments are well aligned with achieving your business goals, making your IT OpEx and CapEx have a much higher ROI.
- An Advanced MSP can help you plan for the future: With a knowledge of your business goals and plans, an advanced MSP can assist with your strategic IT planning and IT budgeting. This helps you manage your business in a way that maximizes your investments in a planned and reliable way, thereby reducing risk and setting obtainable benchmarks.
At SpotLink, we have been managing IT for nearly 20 years, and been honing our skills as an MSP for almost 10. In that time, we have seen how effective IT management can have a marked benefit to a business, as well as how poor IT management can damage it. We are always ready to help your business have a competitive advantage to win in the market place.