August 24, 2021
This article was originally published in February 2017.
There’s a lot of potential for value in a managed services agreement. It allows a small IT department to leverage additional support and personnel to tackle complex projects or offload routine tasks. It provides access to certified IT experts and enables a company to customize an agreement to match their precise needs.
Managed Services Partners (MSPs) do it all: network infrastructure, systems analysis, disaster recovery implementation and monitoring, security analysis, and development. MSPs work across industry – from healthcare to government, education to retail, manufacturing to media – to streamline service, focusing on customer, student, and patient experiences, application performance, and network capabilities. Emerging companies leverage managed services to transition to cloud computing or improve data center infrastructure.
However, beneath all of these value statements, there’s another aspect of managed services that gets less attention than it should: speed. Managed services allows your IT department to do anything and everything at greater speeds. As they say, time is money.
At The Speed of Managed Services
Faster Technology Deployment: Deploying a new technology in an IT environment often requires training, preparation, and sometimes even new personnel to get the job done properly. Managed services allows a company to circumvent these logistical challenges. Our engineers are already trained, certified, and ready to deploy your new application or infrastructure. This could shave days or even weeks off the total deployment time of a new technology.
Division of Labor: Perhaps the largest productivity boost to the IT department occurs because of a clear division of labor. In a managed services agreement, our team will take on any and all responsibilities as dictated by the client. Sometimes that is just monitoring and sometimes it can be much more involved. The point is that those tasks are no longer the responsibility of the in-house team. Instead, the team can turn their attention to other, more important tasks. This dynamic is further evidenced in our monitoring and maintenance procedures.
24×7 Alert Monitoring: One of the biggest challenges an IT department faces is a lack of 24 hour coverage. With small teams being the norm, it is difficult to staff an administrator to be in the office around the clock to address issues that arise.
Maintenance: Issues in your IT environment are never a welcomed thing. When they do strike, you need to take personnel off whatever projects they were working on and turn their attention to the issue at hand. Meanwhile, your other initiatives suffer. Managed services can address this problem. Not only is there a team of engineers ready to address an alert, but the IT department’s existing team can remain focused on their own projects.
Moving Faster at Every Level
Speed is truly the underlying element in every aspect of managed services. There’s a lot to do in an IT environment, and it can quickly distract your team. Managed services provides a safety net to ensure the environment stays afloat and your other projects stay on track. When everything in your environment is running smoothly, the whole department is more productive.
Mark DiBenedetto, Mindsight’s VP of Sales, says the most important KPI of all is response time. Above all, he explains, “timely support is what the client is buying. Which means that in the case of a down site or a down environment, we’ll be there to support you in X amount of time.” Frequency of patches and updates is something else to consider in your negotiations, he says. Some companies want that sort of work done quarterly, others monthly. Nail those details down at the outset; nothing should be ambiguous or open to interpretation.
Interested in learning more about Mindsight Managed Services, how we approach the SLA process and our track record of delivering upon our promises? Contact us today to learn more.
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About Mindsight
Mindsight, a Chicago IT services provider, is an extension of your team. Our culture is built on transparency and trust, and our team is made up of extraordinary people – the kinds of people you would hire. We have one of the largest expert-level engineering teams delivering the full spectrum of IT services and solutions, from cloud to infrastructure, collaboration to contact center. Our highly-certified engineers and process-oriented excellence have certainly been key to our success. But what really sets us apart is our straightforward and honest approach to every conversation, whether it is for an emerging business or global enterprise. Our customers rely on our thought leadership, responsiveness, and dedication to solving their toughest technology challenges.
Contact us at GoMindsight.com.