Using a Managed Service Provider (MSP) will keep your IT up to date and ready for whatever challenges your organisation faces in future. Read on to find out about the benefits of MSPs.
‘Asset Light’ is business jargon that means what the MBA using it wants it to mean. In manufacturing it’s a strategy used to eliminate fixed costs by outsourcing production.
(Like Apple do – but no-one describes them as asset light!)
It’s better applied to departments within an organisation – if your IT department is asset light the cash that would have been spent buying and running hardware, building and maintaining a data center, cooling the equipment, air-conditioning the space, can be invested in the core business. It’s an accelerating trend across all types and sizes of organisations from SMEs with a handful of servers through larger organisations with perhaps hundreds up to large corporations and public bodies with thousands.
Exchanging a large capital investment for an ongoing expense isn’t just a one-time, short-term bonanza; managed properly, an outsourced IT strategy should save money in the long term too.
Benefits Of MSPs
1. Scaling to meet demand
If you provide all your own hardware, it has to be specified to meet the demands of your busiest periods, with capacity in hand to cope with unexpected surges, or hardware failure at a crucial moment. A company developing its own software will need significant testing infrastructure for it’s developers to work on – but only during office hours. For much of the time, a significant portion of your investment is sitting idle. Cloud infrastructure and services, on the other hand, can be scaled up and down as required and billed by the hour, so you only pay for what you need. If you are not processing huge amounts of data overnight and at the weekend an MSP can scale back your provision and save you money.
2. Cloud expertise
The key phrase is ‘managed properly.’ When it comes to deciding what to keep in-house, what to put into a Cloud, which Cloud provider to use – perhaps setting up a hybrid Cloud with some data and certain processes kept in-house – there are almost endless options and a lot to consider. One benefit is that an MSP can guide you through all the options and make sure you have the best system for your organisation as it is, and crucially have the flexibility to change as your operation changes.
3. Technology to meet your needs
A good MSP will have relationships with different technology providers and will be able to use those to benefit your organisation by meeting your specific needs. Management tools will ensure your IT system is functioning correctly at all times and can detect, and usually correct, any issue before it adversely affects your organization. Your solution will be designed around your needs as an organisation – if you depend on high availability 24/7 technical support then that can be included in your service level agreement.
4. Security and privacy regulations
Another benefit of partnering with an MSP is that they’ll ensure your Cloud based system meets all the data handling security and privacy regulations applicable to your business by working to the appropriate standards for information security (ISO 27000 Series). When managing provision for public bodies they will ensure that the whole provision meets the IL3 standard for data security.
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This article was syndicated from Business 2 Community: What Are The Benefits Of Partnering With An MSP?
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