Why work with a Managed Service Provider

Why outsource your IT?

This question can be asked for any kind of service. Take accounting, for example. Although accounts are important in every business, it is common to engage an external accountant, or at least have the books audited regularly by an external firm.

As a company, you should be focusing on your core business. IT, accountancy, fleet, etc. are mainly there to support that goal. You want your company to be the best in your niche, not a generalist jack-of-all-trades. To achieve that, you need to stay lean and use the resources at your disposal. The right IT setup is essential.

The risk of hiring and doing things yourself

When you hire new IT staff members as a non-IT company, there are several disadvantages to be aware of:

• You will have to engage in the war for talent. This applies especially to highly educated IT personnel such as cybersecurity and cloud specialists. They are often offered jobs before they even graduate or join the company where they did their internship. Their options are truly endless. Career-oriented candidates choose a job where they can grow and explore various technologies. A job where they can learn from certified experts, who will mentor them and make sure they are part of a team that delivers solutions. But also a job where they can obtain as many certificates as possible to support career advancement.
• As a non-IT company, it is very difficult to attract good junior staff, and even harder to keep them. You will need to supervise them well. A strong, supportive team and the right coaching is essential.
• You can also go for an experienced engineer. Experienced in which areas, though? A very difficult question. Imagine walking into a hospital and looking for an experienced doctor capable of curing any future illness you might have, even though you are currently in perfect health.
  This experienced engineer will need to manage your networks, firewall, emails, files, ERP, CRM, DevOps, resolve printer jams, help end users with mailing lists, … Preferably all in one IT platform, with all tools working together seamlessly. A mission impossible. Moreover, how will this person stay up to date on everything? They will spend more time on training than on their actual work. How do you keep their job challenging? Senior staff isn’t always keen to be answering support calls all day long…

And what if your new staff members don’t perform well or leave you anyway? Constantly recruiting, training and arranging handovers is not only expensive and time-consuming, it also poses a risk to your business continuity. And can you find another person in time for a proper handover, is all documentation correct and up-to-date?

The person to whom IT staff reports, whether that is an IT manager or a C-level executive, will also have to monitor their work. Do we have a disaster recovery plan, have we tested it, and what about cybersecurity?

The advantages of working with a Managed Service Provider

An MSP is not just a tech company, it’s a people business. A collaboration with such a diverse group of people, with complementary skills, may be just what your IT heart desires. Patient first-line technicians put employees at ease. Specialised security engineers get their kicks out of tricky technical issues. And last but not least, project managers have a passion for deadlines, communicate in human language and report based on clear SLAs or KPIs. That does-it-all, mission-impossible IT person has become a whole team of experts who are always available to help you.

Do you already employ strong IT staff or have a talented junior working for you? This can work very well in combination with an MSP. Young, high potentials want to learn from the best. A Managed Service Provider can be a beneficial environment for them. They will come into contact with many different kinds of technology and have a chance to interact closely with vendors in their areas of interest. This gives them ample opportunity to become niche experts in their preferred domains.

On-the-job training, combined with a team of experts to assist the juniors, makes all the difference. Young talents can work and deliver projects of consistent quality, confident that they have access to support as needed.

Pre-defined vendor learning paths like CompTIA are a requirement for many professionals who are changing careers and want to start in our industry. And for the experts, vendor-specific niche training courses keep them up to date on new technologies and risks. As an Executive Member of the CompTIA Benelux community, I consider training opportunities in our industry a personal priority.

A strong MSP has also developed a standard product and toolkit. This software and hardware mix is balanced as to price, because an MSP also has competitors, of course. Over the course of many years, these solutions have been tested extensively in all kinds of environments and situations. The technologies are known from A to Z and back again. For an MSP, their main cost is labour, so they are committed to automation. And you share the benefits.

Find your MSP match!

Do you often end up shelving digital plans for more immediately urgent matters? Daily IT challenges can take up a lot of your IT staff’s time. Recognise this struggle? Then look for an MSP to suit your needs. As an IT partner, we will help you on your way to growth. Want to learn more? Read more about our Managed Services or feel free to contact us!