How an MSP Can Improve Your IT Operations
The right MSP can help to extend IT resources and capabilities at your business without the expense or difficulty of finding, hiring, and retaining new staff or retraining and reallocating the staff you have. In addition, MSP resources can help you to focus your internal resources on tasks and projects with greater urgency or higher business value.
If your business is pursuing or considering any digital transformation initiatives, an MSP can provide significant help with those as well. MSPs often have more resources to devote than any individual business to tracking and learning about emerging technologies. MSPs also tend to have more direct experience with implementation, integration, and management of diverse technologies than most individual businesses. This means the right MSP can help guide you and your business through the technological, organizational, and cultural challenges that every significant IT-related initiative may face.
What to Look for in a Managed Service Provider
You and your colleagues have multiple options and choices to make concerning how best to evaluate, select, implement, manage, and orchestrate IT resources. Given the criticality of IT to the survival, growth, and evolution of your business, how well your business performs these tasks directly affects its other most critical assets – its people, its money, and its reputation.
To ensure consistently effective implementation, management, and security of your cloud-based resources, your business should seriously consider working with an MSP.
To work with an MSP successfully, you need the right combination of technologies, skills, experience, and commitment. Your chosen MSP partner must demonstrate an understanding of your business’ unique needs, and credible evidence that they have the solutions, expertise, and ecosystem to get you to your goals. Certifications in specific technologies and solutions can help here. If they matter, you must ensure your contract guarantees that those assigned to work with you are among those who are actually certified.
The Service Level Agreement (SLA): An Essential Part of Any MSP Relationship
MSPs face multiple challenges, but offer multiple potential benefits to companies that engage them wisely and manage those relationships well. SLAs can be valuable assets to those companies.
Good SLAs talk about in specific detail the services the MSP is to provide, as well as any relevant services for which the MSP is not responsible. Solid SLAs also include specific service level objectives (SLOs), based on measurements or credible estimates of business needs related to each service.
In the past, many businesses acquired IT services based on the number of users or servers. Today, many IT decision-makers instead base their negotiations with MSPs on business-specific SLOs and SLAs. You should ask every candidate MSP partner to supply sample SLAs and SLOs for review by your IT and contractor management teams. In addition, you must ensure that the SLAs and SLOs you demand are based on the most accurate, complete, and timely information available about your IT environment and business needs.