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 this lies near the heart of every business, it is very common to use an external accountant, or at least have your books audited regularly by an external accounting firm.

As a company, you want to focus on your core business. And IT, accountancy, automotive, … are mainly there to support that goal. You want to be the best in your niche, not a generalist jack-of-all-trades. To do this, you need to stay lean and work with the right resources at the right time. The right IT setup is essential for this.

The risk of hiring and doing it yourself

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

• You will have to fight the war for talent. Especially for highly educated IT personnel, such as cybersecurity and cloud specialists. They often get a contract even before they graduate or join the company where they did their internship. Their choice is truly endless. Therefore, these career makers choose the job where they can grow and get a taste of different technologies. A job where they can learn from certified experts, who guide them and make sure they are part of a team that delivers solutions. But also where they can obtain as many certificates as possible, in order to use them in their further careers.
• As a non-IT company, it will be very difficult to get good juniors, and even more difficult to keep them. Therefore, be sure to follow them up well. A strong team around them and the right guidance is essential.
• You can also go for an experienced engineer. But experienced in which field? A very difficult question. You can compare it to walking into a hospital and looking for an experienced doctor who can cure any future illness you might have, while you are perfectly fine now.
  This experienced engineer has to manage your networks, firewall, e-mails, files, ERP, CRM, DevOps, printer jams, help end-users with mailing lists, … And preferably all in one IT platform where all tools work together seamlessly. A mission impossible. Moreover, how do you keep this person up to date in all areas? He will spend more time on training than on his work. How do you keep the job challenging? Answering support calls all day long, senior profiles are not really keen on that…

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

The person to whom the IT staff reports, whether that is the IT manager or a C-Level executive, will have to carry out checks on the work done. 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. This diverse group of people, with complementary skills, may be just what your IT heart needs. There are patient first-line technicians who can put employees at ease. There are specialised security engineers who get their kicks out of the most difficult technical issues. And last but not least, the project managers, who love deadlines, communicate in human language and report with clear SLAs or KPIs. That all-in-one-mission-impossible IT person has been transformed into this whole team of experts and they are constantly available to you.

Do you already employ strong IT staff or did a talented junior choose to work for you? This can be perfectly combined with an MSP.  Young high potentials want to learn from the best. In this case, a Managed Service Provider is a beneficial environment for them. They get in contact with a wide array of technology and have the possibility to interact closely with vendors in their area of interest. Giving them a highway of opportunity to become niche experts in their preferred domain.

On-the-job training, combined with a team of experts assisting the juniors, makes all the difference. Young talents can work and deliver a project with consistent quality, knowing that someone is there to support them when needed.

Pre-defined vendor learning paths like CompTIA are a requirement for many startups who are changing careers and want to start in our industry. And for the experts, you have vendor-specific niche training courses to keep up to date with any new technologies or risks. As Executive Member of the CompTIA Benelux community, training in our industry is one of my personal priorities.

A strong MSP has also developed a standard product and toolkit. This software and hardware mix is price-wise balanced, because of course, an MSP has competitors. Thanks to years of experience, these solutions have also been extensively tested in all kinds of environments and situations. The technologies are known from A to Z and vice versa. The biggest cost for an MSP is the labour cost, so automation is the message. And you can only benefit from that.

Find your MSP match!

Have you often had to shelve your digital plans for more urgent matters? Daily IT challenges take up a lot of your IT staff’s time. Recognise this struggle? Then look for an MSP that suits you. As an IT partner, we will help you on your way to growth. Want to know more? Read more about our Managed Services or feel free to contact us!