With the recent spike in cyber-attacks and the rising costs and added pressure of managing complicated remote work environments, more and more businesses are turning towards managed service providers (MSP) for help. The key in choosing a reliable partner for long-term engagement lies in choosing a partner with niche experience in your specific business function. IT Consulting Los Angeles can be a great resource to start your research on how to select the most relevant business partner MSP.
With a trusted, third-party MSP, your business can accrue significant cost savings and the ability to leverage industry-leading tools technologies and expertise on demand. This has a holistic effect on improving the efficacy of your daily operations, including key areas such as smoother work processes, increased productivity, enhanced user experience and customer experience. If you want to maintain an in-house IT team, you will be doing them a favor as well by freeing them from routine maintenance and focusing their energies towards more complex problem solving and developing creative solutions for critical business needs. A recent CompTIA survey of over 400 businesses leveraging the services of manage service providers reported holistic improvements to business processes and bottom line through:
- Decrease in IT budget by nearly 25% or more (46% of respondents) with some reporting IT spending cuts more than 50% (13% of respondents).
- Reduction in annual cost ranging anywhere between 1% to 24% (50% of respondents).
While the numbers are truly promising, you need to keep in mind that every business is unique and your managed service provider needs to understand and adapt itself to meet the specific needs of your business. A cost saving approach adopted by your competitor may not suit your specific production environment and your managed service provider needs to be nuanced enough to understand that in order to drive true cost savings.
Do MSPs Save You Money?
Here’s the lowdown on cost-savings and other benefits enabled by MSPs:
Reduction in hardware costs and simplified management
Undeniable benefit of engaging managed service providers come from the substantial savings any business can leverage by opting for managed cloud services vis-a-vis going the traditional route of building and managing your own infrastructure. MSPs enable you to leverage nearly every form of infrastructure as a service made available on demand. These include offerings like SOCaaS, DRaaS, BUaaS and more that can help your business skip ahead of growth cycles when not being bogged down by prohibitive costs of power, storage, maintenance, lifecycle management, software, and more. Leveraging MSPs also allows you to reduce significant unplanned costs. MSPs can take care of regular but cumbersome tasks such as tracking your hardware and peripherals, keeping track of manufacturer contracts and keeping communication lines open and effective.
Guaranteed uptimes and reduction in software and network costs
Your business simply cannot afford to compromise on continuous uptime any longer, if you have to remain competitive. Apart from the humongous costs associated with downtimes, these can also result in loss of critical business opportunities, and wasted man hours. With MSPs managing the entirety of your infrastructure, you will have the assurance of SLA-backed guarantees on uptime. This can potentially end up saving you thousands of dollars in the long term. With 24/7/365 monitoring, MSPs can help anticipate potential issues in your network before they arise and even solve them in the background without you becoming aware of them. Most importantly, MSPs like Managed IT services Los Angeles allow you to have on-demand access to industry-leading suite of technologies, tools, and experts on niche matters of cyber security and enterprise strategy.
Provides a Cost-Effective Solution
Possibly the best part of engaging the services of MSPs is that they allow you to keep your infrastructure costs predictable and manageable. The wide range of boutique services offered by managed service providers, such as IT support Los Angeles, can be a lifesaver for businesses that are still early on in their growth cycles.
Saves on employee productivity costs
Many businesses have been forced to work with lean IT departments thanks to rising costs and the unpredictable situation caused by the pandemic. You cannot afford to have these teams bogged down by mundane work. You need your in-house team to be creative and agile in problem-solving – something that is very difficult to do when they are slammed with regular maintenance and upkeep of your infrastructure. A key benefit of engaging MSPs is that you can effectively put maintenance, streamlining of processes, workflow standardization, and monitoring of your infrastructure on auto pilot. This allows your in-house team to focus on business drivers enhancing both productivity and job satisfaction.
Reduction in resource usage
While in-house teams and MSPs should never be mutually exclusive, you can leverage the strength of MSPs to cut down on additional and even some existing labor costs. This allows for businesses to grow sustainably without the added burden of extra labor expenses. Since most of the infrastructure you need is also made available on demand through access to topline technology tools and software by MSPs – you can leverage enterprise level infrastructure efficiency even if you are just starting out with your business. This enables businesses to have a greater ROI, not just through business efficiencies, but also with significantly lower sunk costs in infrastructure.
Reputation Costs
Disruptions in day-to-day business flow such as persistent network issues, unintentional loss of data, accidental downtimes can all cause your business to take a significant hit in terms of reputation. When customers trust you with their data, they expect it to be protected at all costs. If your business is unable to meet that obligation due to infrastructure or cloud-based issues, it can cause serious reputation damage. Managed service providers allow you to effectively handle reputation risk management by enabling a more secure, proactive, updated, always available, and comprehensively monitored IT environment. You can also leverage services like BaaS and DRaaS to guarantee the security of all sensitive business data.
Better Technology Investments
Technology investments play a critical role in the growth of your company. However, you also need to moderate IT spending in order to remain functional and profitable on a regular basis. MSPs like Managed IT services Los Angeles can help you in this regard with relevant expertise in strategic technology investments that are relevant for your specific business needs and not simply chasing after the latest and greatest.
About Brent:
Brent Whitfield is the CEO of DCG Technical Solutions LLC. DCG provides specialist advice and IT outsourcing Los Angeles area businesses need to remain competitive and productive while being sensitive to limited IT budgets.
Brent has been featured in Fast Company, CNBC, Network Computing, Reuters, and Yahoo Business. He also leads SMBTN – Los Angeles, a MSP peer group that focuses on continuing education for MSP’s and IT professionals. https://www.dcgla.com was recognized among the Top 10 Fastest Growing MSPs in North America by MSP mentor.