Why work with
a Managed Service Provider?

Why outsource your IT?

This is a good question, one that can be asked for any service. For example, accounting. While accounting is essential for any company, it’s very common to engage an external accountant, or at least for an external company to regularly review the accounts.

As a company, you should focus on your core activities. IT, accounting, fleet management, etc. are all there to support that goal. You want your company to the best in your niche, not a jack of all trades. To achieve this, your organisation must remain ‘lean’, working with the resources you have available. The right IT infrastructure is essential for this.

The risks of hiring people and doing it yourself

If you’re a non-IT-company hiring new IT employees, be aware of several disadvantages:

• You’ll have to compete in the war for talent, especially for highly skilled IT professionals like cybersecurity and cloud specialists. Often, these professionals are hired before they even graduate or they return to where they started their internship. Their options are truly endless. Career-driven candidates choose a job where they can grow and explore diverse technologies. A job where they can learn from certified experts, who coach them and make sure they feel part of a team that delivers solutions. But equally a job where they have the opportunity to gain as many certificates as possible, with an eye on their future career.
• As a non-IT company, it’s very hard to attract good junior employees and even harder to retain them. Effective mentoring is essential, and this requires a strong, supportive team with the right coaching.
• You can also go for an experienced engineer. But experienced in what? That’s a difficult question. Imagine going to hospital and looking for an experienced doctor who can treat every possible future illness, even though you’re currently healthy. These experienced engineers are expected to manage your networks, firewall, e-mails, files, ERP, CRM and DevOps, fix printer issues, assist end users with mailing lists, … and ideally all within one IT platform, in which all tools work seamlessly. An impossible mission. And how does this person stay up to date with everything? More time will be spent on training than actual work. How do you keep their job challenging? Senior professionals are not eager to spend their entire day answering support calls …

And what if your new employees are ineffective or move on elsewhere? Constant recruitment, training and handovers are not only expensive and time consuming, but also create a risk for the continuity of your business. And can you find someone to take over in time so that information can be transferred? And is all documentation correct and up to date?

The person to whom IT staff report, whether this be an IT manager or C-level executive, will also need to monitor their work. Is there an emergency recovery plan, has it been tested, and how do things stand with cybersecurity?

On-the-job training makes a difference, especially in combination with a team of experts who support juniors. Young talents can work and deliver projects of consistent quality while always counting on support.

Predefined learning paths from vendors like CompTIA are a requirement for many professionals looking to make a career switch and work in our industry. Experts, meanwhile, keep up to date on new technologies and risk through vendor-specific niche training. As an executive member of the CompTIA Benelux community, I personally consider training opportunities in our industry to be a priority.

A strong MSP also has a standard product and toolkit with software and hardware at a balanced and competitive price. These solutions have undergone years of testing in various environments and situations, and the technologies are well-known from A to Z. Since labour is the main cost for an MSP, the focus lies on automation. And you benefit from that.