Outsourcing is effective and efficient however it must be done right. Find out what should Managed Services Provider offer your business to be successful.
Managed services providers are also known as IT managed services or managed IT services providers. It has been becoming extremely popular in multiple industries including legal, manufacturing, construction and healthcare. By leveraging managed IT services, you will be able to provide your employees with access to enterprise-grade technology, expert-level knowledge and IT support services. This will all be done at a fraction of the cost to implement and maintain the same in-house IT department.
Shopping for a managed IT services provider is not easy as they may seem the same with services that overlap one another however there are several ways to distinguish between services offered by many IT managed services providers (MSP).
There are five key areas that every managed IT services provider (MSP) must offer to be best in class and to offer the best return on investment (ROI).
Proactive 24x7x365 monitoring and management for servers, workstations and infrastructure devices
Proactive monitoring is a very vague term. Every managed IT services provider offers it but what really sets apart the leaders is their robust and customized monitoring solution. They should be using enterprise class remote monitoring and management (RMM) and professional services automation (PSA) software. The managed IT services provider must be able to monitor your servers, workstations, networked devices such as firewalls, routers, switches, and uninterruptable power supplies.
Established and documented Service Level Agreements with 24x7x365 IT support services
The managed IT services provider must stand behind their service. By using our tools, we can measure every aspect of a IT support services ticket. Example from June 2015 to June 2016, the 365 iT SOLUTIONS team was able to resolve 97.9 percent of all tickets remotely. That is not a bad number when you consider they handled over 12,000 tech support requests in that timeframe. Tech Support services and managed IT services should be structured with measurable Service Level Agreement (SLA) in place. This will address the expectations, response times and availability.
Available to provide on-site technical support
The managed IT services provider must be able to physically get onsite to provide tech support services when required. Even thou most tech support is remote these days, in case of emergency, you will still need a someone to get onsite physically.
Proactive managed data backup and disaster recovery
Is your data safe? Are your backups working? Has this been verified? Do you have offsite backups? Where are they located? How fast can you get your company back up and running? It is important that this is addressed properly by ensuring safe and secure backups including required off-site replication and redundancy. Off-site replication means sending your data backups to a remote location however you need to know where they are located.
Virtual CIO (vCIO) services
Your managed IT services provider is basically your virtual CIO services. They should handle your IT budgeting, IT planning and IT support service history including the health of your infrastructure. They will plan your long-term technology strategy and growth according to your IT budgets and business goals. A great managed IT services provider will invest in your business as they see a long term relationship as profitable, not short term.
365 iT SOLUTIONS is a leading IT consulting firm in Toronto. Our 100% Canadian team delivers industry leading Managed IT Services, IT Support Services, IT Outsourcing Services, Tech Support Services and Cloud Services.
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What Should Managed Services Providers Offer Your Business?
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