Why does your business need an MSP?
Managed service providers (MSPs) offer a range of services to support and optimise your connectivity and networking service and performance. There are several convincing reasons why a business might need an MSP.
Let’s consider a few of the most compelling reasons why your business might need an MSP.
1. Your inhouse team is struggling to support your service requirements
Even with highly skilled inhouse teams, many organisations struggle to meet the demands of modern connectivity requirements. If you struggle with service disruptions, system vulnerabilities, intermittent or poor network performance or in meeting potential security threats, choosing to outsource these problems to an MSP is an obvious solution.
You’ll benefit from expert support, proactive troubleshooting and 24/7 cover. Your internal IT team can be relieved of network management tasks and can redirect their energies to the specialist digital requirements unique to your business, knowing that your network is expertly monitored, optimised for performance and well protected.
2. You need to reduce the overheads associated with running your operations without compromising service levels
The cost of running an inhouse team isn’t cheap. As well as recruiting and retaining highly skilled experts in IT and network management, you need to allow for all the costs of keeping the team’s skills up to date. Maintaining 24/7 service even when your team is on holiday or off sick means you need to build depth in the team. This adds to the expense of your wage bill.
By contrast, outsourcing network management to an MSP offers a much more affordable and predictable service cost. Added to that, you are guaranteed an agreed level of service under the service level agreements (SLAs) you negotiate with your MSP. You can tailor these service levels to the particular needs of your business.
In addition, working with your MSP can highlight other opportunities to save money. Your MSP will have specialist knowledge of different providers and will be purchasing at scale from them. This often gives them access to better rates for services and hardware than you could negotiate on your own. Furthermore, they will have the necessary expertise to identify tweaks to your existing infrastructure and provisioning that can save you money.
3. You need to access specialist skills
Network services cover a host of technologies, providers and specialist skills. Ensuring your team is up to date on all of these is, likely, unfeasible.
An MSP specialises in network service provision, so it will have a wide range of people on staff covering all these technologies and skillsets. Working with an MSP is an easy and scalable way to access this expertise.
This way, you can tackle proactive network monitoring and maintenance projects as well as considering a whole host of specialist projects to keep your network up to date. For example, your MSP could assist you with rolling out software-defined networking solutions (SD WAN), secure access service edge (SASE) technologies or advanced 24/7 network monitoring solutions.
4. You want to improve your network security
Some of the specialist skills your MSP brings to the table centre on cyber security. This complex topic requires a great deal of investment and expertise to get right. Working with an MSP helps you access this expertise at an affordable cost.
Your MSP has access to sophisticated cyber-security tools and can facilitate cost-effective 24/7 network monitoring. This way, you can be alerted to threats early, deal with them quickly and minimise any potential disruption.
Your MSP will also take a proactive approach to patching and other day-to-day security tasks that help to protect your network, data and operational resiliency.
5. You want to take a more strategic and proactive approach to network management
Operating in today’s world depends on effective connectivity solutions. This means that getting your managed service provision right can be an important source of competitive advantage.
Inhouse teams are often so busy managing the day-to-day activities of network management, that it can be hard to step back and make a proactive strategic assessment of how your infrastructure, performance and resilience can be improved. Working with an MSP that has a track record of proactive, strategic network management gives you an opportunity to improve the way your essential business infrastructure is run.
This goes beyond delivering cost savings, to making strategic improvements that can deliver the performance you need to drive your business forward and meet new opportunities.