Why MSPs should take care of your IT needs

According to Nate Sheen, President of Datacom Technologies, MSPs are becoming a critical part of small businesses because of how important technology has become for businesses today.

Emphasis on automation

Convenience has become a priority for businesses and individuals alike. We now schedule our social media posts and have templates set for our work. It makes our work all the more efficient. Automation saves precious time and adds to your business’s productivity.

This whole trend toward recurring revenue is all well and good, but without utilizing a managed service approach to automate your solutions, offer more solutions, and reduce overhead while increasing customer engagement and satisfaction, I don't believe a provider in the retail solutions space gets ahead. In fact, I think they continue to wither away and die, just as they would if they don't offer recurring options.

Chris Rumpf President/CEO/Founder, Rumpf Computer Solutions

So how do we achieve automation for your business’s various processes? That’s where PSA and RMM come in. PSA (Professional services automation) and RMM (Remote monitoring and management) solutions paired together can prove to be strong tools that let you automate your processes flexibly.

PSA and RMM solutions are an important aspect of managed services. PSAs allow MSPs to manage all the necessary back office and front office activities. Meanwhile, RMM lets MSPs remotely manage your computers, networks, and endpoints. It allows MSPs to remotely roll out patches and provide solutions.

These two tools together automate processes that would otherwise eat into the business’s resources and time. They make things easier for you, especially as you are growing.

Related reading: Boost MSP efficiency with unified PSA and RMM solution

Reliability

Last year, COVID crept into everyone’s lives unannounced. And at a time when uncertainty and chaos ran rampant throughout industries, MSPs continued to provide their customers with their services. They were able to achieve this kind of efficiency by quickly adopting remote work.

An MSP can also help you architect a business continuity plan (BCP) to make sure your business runs smoothly even in the face of adversity.  Moreover, MSPs can also take care of security and compliance issues. They can also take care of your networking needs through an RMM, all the while optimizing everything else. With an MSP, you can also rest assured that the latest technology will always be available to you.

Cost savings and ROI

One of the biggest advantages of hiring an MSP is cost-effectiveness. Coming up with in-house infrastructure and maintaining it can be a costly affair. It is a problem if you’re a small to medium business and your primary product is not IT-based. An MSP will take care of your entire cloud infrastructure and reduce operational costs.

A survey conducted by CompTIA revealed that out of the businesses it surveyed, 96% of respondents believed that an MSP saved them a substantial amount of money on an annual basis. Among them, 184 indicated a reduction in cost by 25% or more. On the other hand, 58 of the respondents indicated a reduction in cost by 50%.

Most MSPs offer a subscription model, allowing the client to hire their services through flexible monthly or yearly plans. This allows small and medium businesses to comfortably plan out expenses in advance. Your business also saves on IT expenses and can conserve capital budget that can be used in other areas. With an MSP subscription, you will be able to comfortably save your monetary resources and make use of those resources in areas that require more attention.

Allows you to focus on core business

Hiring the services of an MSP means you won’t need to worry about maintaining your own internal IT team. Very often, businesses that don’t specialize in IT fail to understand this problem and they end up allocating resources to manage a dedicated IT team. An IT budget would typically entail IT labor, maintenance costs, software, and network infrastructure and hardware costs. It’s found that the average small business spends 6.9% of its revenue on IT.

Worse, many businesses do not invest in a dedicated IT team. They instead come up with a makeshift IT team by trying to equip their existing employees to take care of the business’s IT needs. It not only adds to their already existing responsibilities but also makes it difficult for them to focus on their primary roles.

Moreover, there is no assurance of efficiency with this approach like there is with an MSP. That’s because MSPs have a team of experts with experience across the complete spectrum of managing IT infrastructure. Thus, your IT worries take a back seat, and you can instead focus on allocating your resources in revenue generation and innovation.

Disaster management/Data Recovery

Everyone hates downtime. On average, IT downtime costs $5600 per minute, which can cascade into figures like  $300,000 per hour. Downtime also causes businesses to lose at least 5% of productivity. The possibility of such disasters is more prominent in the case of on-prem IT infrastructure. A critical server error can adversely affect productivity and business. MSPs rely on cloud-based solutions to handle your data. With standby backup servers on the ready, the possibility of downtimes is pretty much eliminated.

Another trend that affects how MSPs serve their clients is the move of infrastructure to the cloud. Many businesses are moving workloads to Microsoft Azure, Amazon, or Google cloud. Amazon and Microsoft have even built out partner programs for MSPs. A successful MSP will be an expert in these cloud solutions and support them for their clients.

	Mike Herrington VP of sales and marketing, i.t. NOW

Furthermore, because all your data is stored on virtual servers, you can afford to stay carefree about hardware failures and the problems caused by them. Most importantly, you will have round-the-clock support from the MSP. The MSP will take care of these tech disasters so that you don’t have to navigate your way around them.

Scalability

IT is a high-paced environment where innovation occurs daily and tech moves at a rapid pace. As such, there is always a need for businesses to scale up or down. One of the biggest obstacles faced by a business as it grows is the obsolescence of its hardware. Technology requirements often tend to outgrow a company’s resources.

Related reading: Driving the hardware replacement cycle

The MSP optimizes its services to make sure your needs are fulfilled. From upgrades to hardware cycles, they make sure the IT side of things is completely up and running. MSPs accommodate rapid changes and are available to respond to these changes in real-time. They can also take care of your cybersecurity requirements. Moreover, they can also accommodate your business to scale down if needed.

An efficient  MSP will also offer optional advanced services like proactive monitoring and more, thereby ensuring that your business receives great scalability out of its partnership with the MSP.

To sum it up

Managed services is the next logical step … even for an ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ industry like point of sale. POS resellers — all of them — will have to include managed services as a service offering either now or in the future. Otherwise, they may have no real future.

Greg Dixon Chief Technology Officer, ScanSource

Managed services are the future. Especially now that remote work has received a lot of traction. Not only are MSPs cost-friendly, but they also add that extra bit of protection and reliability that makes a world of difference in the long run.

Taking advantage of managed services just makes a lot of sense as it future-proofs your business’s tech. More importantly, it takes a huge load off of your business and allows you to be that much more productive.