Managed services is a solution where some or all of your company’s IT or application hosting/maintenance/support needs are outsourced to an expert managed services partner. Whether you have a dedicated in-house IT team or are starting from scratch, there are several benefits managed services provider can offer your company.
What are the Benefits of Managed Services?
Managed services are a popular solution for growing businesses and for businesses with complex applications (such as business intelligence applications) that can be inefficient to support in-house. Not only do managed services help to manage costs, but it also helps to improve scalability, security, expertise, and reliability.
1. Maximize Your In-House Team
Much of systems management includes time-consuming or repetitive tasks such as application management and updating, user access or permissions, and troubleshooting. It also often relies on IT team members being “on-call” to resolve urgent support needs by staff or customers. By utilizing managed services, your managed services provider (MSP) takes care of these needs, freeing up your internal IT team to focus on more strategic business needs.
2. High-Level Expertise
Each information technologies (IT) professional has a different background of training and expertise. For an in-house hire, this means either HR or a hiring manager is in charge of deciphering these qualifications to make the best hire possible. With a managed services provider, you only have to vet the company, then trust that the experts in their employ are highly knowledgeable and have outstanding training to support your information technology needs. For managing services for a business intelligence application such as Alteryx or Tableau, this means choosing a managed services provider with specific experience supporting, managing, and optimizing these systems.
3. Affordability
Another reason people choose managed services over—or in conjunction with—an in-house team is its affordability. With managed services, you pay only for what you need. This means for menial, time-consuming tasks such as troubleshooting or software updating, you are paying only for the time and level of expertise needed for those tasks. This can mean significant savings compared to an expert full-time, in-house hire. Managed services allow you to more strategically allocate costs, whether you’re augmenting an in-house team or have no internal staff at all.
4. Scalability
Managed services also have the benefit of being more scalable than a purely in-house team. Managed services mean you don’t have to engage full-time hours (and pay) with each employee on your IT staff. You can receive the exact amount of support you need—no more, no less—at any time. This is particularly important when your technical needs have outgrown your current resources but do not yet justify an additional in-house hire. In an in-house setting, each new hire comes with a big salary commitment, not to mention benefits and onuses. However, a managed services provider can provide the amount of support you need in increments, providing a smoother bridge between different stages of growth. In addition, a managed services provider (MSP) has the resources to scale quickly and efficiently as your business grows, minimizing downtime and growing pains as well as expense.
5. Predictable Costs
Managed services also offer more predictable costs than other IT management solutions. Our business model is based on knowing hard and soft costs related to each of the management services and solutions we present. This means we will communicate the cost upfront and minimize hidden fees or unknown costs down the line. This is more difficult with IT strategies that are purely in-house, since things like salaries and raises, bonuses, benefits, unpredictable software or hardware costs, and more can lead to surprising compounding expenses.
6. Improved Reliability & Extended Support Hours
Because managed services providers include a larger, dedicated team of experts as opposed to a small or one-man in-house IT department, the reliability of your services significantly increases. Don’t worry about vacations, off-hours, or overtime—our team works together for round-the-clock monitoring without additional expenses. Additionally, because we support multiple companies, we have infrastructure capabilities that would be difficult for a single small business to support. This means you have access to technology with a high level of reliability and performance without the associated in-house cost.
Learn More
Are you interested in learning more about how Data Meaning’s managed services can help to support your company’s needs? Reach out and speak with an expert today.