As we wrote about before technology is moving extremely fast and the role of IT Leaders is shifting from being a cost center to being a key enabler of their organization’s growth and success. Currently however difficult for IT Leaders and Departments to cater for innovation and digital transformation since their time is divided between three main things:
- Innovation management & Digital Transformation
- IT Operations & Maintenance
- Employee & Budget Management
With over 70% of their time spent on IT Operations IT leaders find it very difficult to build highly effective teams and drive innovation with the business side to digitally transform their organization.
This is why now more than ever IT Leaders need to start considering working with Managed Services Providers (MSPs).
What is a Managed Services Provider?
A managed services provider is a company that takes the responsibility of managing the customer’s IT infrastructure and/or end-user systems. The infrastructure they manage includes servers, storage, networking and security across on-premise and cloud IT Environments. Typically the 70% IT Leaders and departments are spending right now on operations and user management/support can be completely outsourced to MSPs freeing them up to focus on what is really required these days, aligning with their organization’s strategy, drawing and executing a well thought of Digital Transformation Journey.
However outsourcing IT Operations to a Managed Service Provider isn’t an easy task, a bad MSP can bring more harm than good. Before you decide to take this route there are a number of things that you should consider doing to ensure you partner up with the right MSP.
Managed Services Provider Checklist
- Fast Service & Response Time: The secret of working with a top MSP is that you shouldn’t feel that you are working with a different team. The chosen MSP should provide fast and near immediate service and build a quality relationship with you and your team that makes you truly feel as if they are a part of your team.
- A clear and well defined Service Level Agreement: Fast service and response times are great, but a good MSP will back their offerings with a well defined and structured SLA that provides guarantees and commitments to customers on handling day to day operations and support. Make sure your MSP provides you with that.
- Third party Vendor Partnerships: Your IT Environment is comprised of multiple solutions from different vendors. Your MSP should have a good and varied relationship with these vendors. This relationship will ensure that they get the right support and access to a number of benefits/perks that other MSPs don’t have access to.
- Proactive Services: Your MSP shouldn’t purely be there to fix issues and problems into your environment. Your MSP should have a clear plan and set of services to proactively monitor your environment, provide upgrades, patches and improvements where and when needed.
- Remote and Local onsite technical support: With IT people tend to like the thought of being able to do all the work remotely, but the hard reality is if your network is down there is no way for a remote support agent to log in and provide you with support. Your MSP should provide a mixture of near instant remote support and on the ground resources that can mobilize quickly and support ou once needed.
- Cyber Security Support: Security is one of the most important, if not the most important item on any IT Leaders menu these days. Your MSP should have a clear and ongoing plan on how to secure your IT Assets and keep all incoming/outgoing connections secure. But most importantly you need to make sure that your MSP is secure.
- Compliance Support: Regulatory frameworks are growing (GDPR, NIST, etc…) requiring businesses to implement specific measures in their environment, failure to do so resulting in costly fines and other penalties to your business. Your MSP should have a clear way of implementing these frameworks and keeping them up to date.
- Disaster Recovery & Business Continuity Support: Your MSP should ensure your applications and data are secure at all times and have the ability to restore it in response to critical errors or cyber breaches. Furthermore your MSP should in alignment with you put in place a failover mechanism wherein if one data center fails, your data will rollover to another data center in a different location.
Managed Services Provider Questionnaire
With the above being said, we have compiled a list of questions to ask when assessing the available options:
- Do you offer an IT Help Desk?
- What partnerships do you have with third party vendors?
- Do you have local resources?
- Do you have a team to support our cyber security requirements?
- What compliance frameworks do you support?
- Do you provide network/data/application monitoring?
- What list of proactive services do you provide?
- Do you provide disaster recovery and business continuity services?
- Are your staff members certified
- Do you have experience working with infrastructure and applications similar to yours
- Does the MSP guaranteed uptime, resolution rates and issue response times in it’s SLA
Final Words
MSPs these days are able to offer you more reliable options that often far outweigh the benefits of maintaining your own legacy in-house data centers. If you are considering investing your time and effort aligning your IT Strategy with the business and supporting it to improve it’s growth and revenue generation working with an MSP is mandatory. We hope the hints we provided in this document are able to help you.
BluGrass is a member of Exceeders and is specialized in providing Infrastructure managed services.
Aspida is a member of Exceeders and is specialized in providing managed security services.
Exceeders Collaboration Agreement is an Exceeder offering that combines services, solutions and products from hundreds of service providers and vendors in one yearly agreement that is built to support any organization’s transformation plan.