Is managed IT right for your organization? Ask these 10 questions

With high turnover among IT professionals in recent years, many organizations continue to face challenges recruiting and retaining talent with the skill sets necessary to run an efficient, secure, and resilient technology environment. This trend is driving increasing interest in outsourcing — and not only to sustain the IT function. A managed service provider can help you improve operational efficiency and predictability of costs along with scale and align technology to advance your strategic business goals.

Also, driving growing interest in managed service providers, or managed IT, is a need for organizations to optimize how and where they focus technology spending — and ensure they have enough dollars set aside to begin with. Few businesses earmark the industry metric of 3 to 5% of revenue for IT, meaning tech budgets often are underfunded. IT staff struggle to keep their tech infrastructure up to date and efficient. Timeliness for patches and new initiatives, accuracy, and funding can easily fall behind. With delays, project costs rise — or projects fall off the high-priority list — which puts operational efficiency and security at risk. Engaging a managed service provider allows organizations to get the most out of their spend by having a strong bench of talent to draw on, without hiring and building an internal team.

What is a managed service provider?

Using a managed service provider is a way to support an organization’s core business activities as it relates to technology. Outsourcing some or all IT operations to keep your systems online, reduce downtime, and gain cost savings helps businesses holistically leverage their technology environment to enable success.

Managed IT combines people and technology. Outsourced IT support can include a single project, Tier 1 front-line desktop support, or Tier 3 resolution of complex issues. It can include maintaining server infrastructure or managing cloud migration or cybersecurity incident response. Leveraging automated tools to support clients both remotely and in person, a managed service provider might dedicate a team of 15 to support this organization, delivering cybersecurity services, software updates, patch management, backups, etc., to improve productivity and stability — likely at a lower cost level than hiring additional staff.

Fully managed IT services or comanaged? Let user-count decide

Managed service providers can offer a solution for any size or type of organization, regardless of vertical. Some organizations outsource all their IT maintenance and operations; others adopt a comanaged model, outsourcing select service areas. Revenue doesn’t have to drive the decision between fully or comanaged IT services; rather, user count tends to be a better guide.

Organizations with fewer than 200 users might consider a totally outsourced solution, i.e., fully managed IT, where the managed service provider in effect functions as your IT department. Organizations with more than 200 users and some internal IT staff might consider a comanaged or supplemental option. Partnering with a managed service provider that reports to the internal IT department can ease the demands on a resource-limited IT team. Working with an external partner, IT staff can offload time-consuming but essential tasks to focus on strategic initiatives, while keeping your technology environment secure and up to date.

Some commonly outsourced IT responsibilities include asset management, patch management, network monitoring, backups and disaster recovery, and security monitoring.

Should your organization consider a managed service provider? Ask these 10 questions.

When thinking about fully or comanaged IT services, consider the following questions:

• Does our internal IT team have the capacity, tools, and expertise required to continuously keep hardware, software, and networks up to date, fully operational at all times, and secure?
• Is our internal IT team able to meet SLA requirements to allow our staff to be fully productive with company technology?
• Do we have a formalized technology inventory management program?
• Do we have best-practice patch management processes and procedures in place? Are we patching, testing, and auditing monthly, if not more frequently?
• Are we confident our internal IT team can get our ERP and accounting applications back online and restore data from backups within a few minutes in the event of an outage or breach? Have we tested our disaster recovery plan?
• How are we keeping up with the adoption of new technologies?
• Do we have the capacity, expertise, and tools to monitor — and are we monitoring — 24/7 for suspicious behavior, misuse, cyberbreaches, or data leaks?
• Have we calculated the cost — in dollars, time, and reputation — of lost productivity in the event of an outage or breach?
• What does our cyber insurance provider require? Is our internal IT team able to comply with, or exceed, the requirements?
• Is our IT department working on the projects and initiatives that further our business goals, or is it bogged down with resource-intensive help desk activities and other day-to-day responsibilities?

What are the benefits of a managed service provider?

The cost of a managed service provider is a common first question organizations ask. Leaders are often surprised to learn that managed IT services, even fully managed outsourced IT, can deliver cost savings when compared to hiring an equivalent number of internal IT staff because your spend is used more efficiently. Managed service providers may also be able to offer guidance on the best ways to spend your tech budget, including helping you lay out your technology roadmap plan and budget to ensure you’re spending wisely.

Engaging a managed service provider can also lessen down time and improve stability. Without being proactive here, you risk incidents that your business might struggle to recover from as well as increased cyber insurance premiums (or denied or canceled coverage) and lost revenue.

Managed IT services can help you improve operational efficiency and help your workforce be more productive. Problems get resolved quickly, frustration declines, and staff can leverage technology that “just works.”

Deciding whether to outsource some or all your IT function is a strategic decision. One of the greatest benefits of a managed service provider is how it enables organizations to focus on their core organizational competencies and operations to drive the business forward. Your talent now can spend more time on launching and advancing technology initiatives that align with your overall business strategy, while a managed service provider maintains a scalable and dynamic, efficient, and secure IT environment.