Tag Archives: managed service provider

Your Managed Service Provider (MSP) Can Strengthen Your Company with Scalability

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20160603

Bolster your team with the support of a MSP.

When you hire a high-quality Managed Service Provider (MSP) to handle your company’s IT activities, you’re getting more than just IT support. You’re also receiving services that will help you anticipate the future and sustain your company’s growth.

An important quality that companies need in their IT activities is scalability. Given the rate of technological change, and the fact that companies often need to expand to accommodate larger scale operations and more employees, scalability is critical to supporting business growth.

How can your MSP contribute to scalability?

Your MSP will provide your company with scalable IT solutions, helping you succeed as your business develops and new technologies emerge.

A recent article from eWeek lists scalability as one of ten best practices IT professionals must bring to their work. It’s vital for your company’s development and growth. Imagine that you need to launch a new operation but find yourself getting held back by unexpectedly limited capacities or resources. This could prove devastating to your company’s success. Scalability allows for rapid changes and gives you the flexibility to undergo new developments, whether it’s your need to grow, to scale back, or to direct your company down a new path.

What are some activities that demand scalability?

  • Hiring new employees. With new employees, you need to accommodate new devices, expanded software services, and a greater amount of data getting generated in the course of business operations. Employees often use multiple devices, such as desktop computers, laptops, and smartphones. Can your IT solutions readily encompass these new devices and the data they process and transmit?
  • Managing data. Your company’s activities produce enormous quantities of data, and the volume can continue growing at a rapid pace. Data needs to get managed well: stored, protected, backed up, and organized, particularly when it’s critical data. Your data management solutions must be scalable. You need to always have enough space for your data, and that space must remain secure against cyber attacks and other IT disasters.
  • Keeping your company secure. Cyber criminals are always looking out for vulnerabilities in your devices and network defenses. Strong cyber security involves round-the-clock network monitoring to detect suspicious activities. Scalability is a key quality for your cyber security plan. No matter what new devices or programs you incorporate into your business activities, your cyber security solutions must cover them immediately.
  • Determining software usage. Certain kinds of software you need throughout the year, while in other cases a program may prove necessary only for certain weeks or months. Scalability allows you to govern software usage in a cost-effective way, so that you’re paying for services only when you need them. Scalability also lets you quickly give new employees access to your software, and remove their access or privileges when necessary.

The benefits of scalability

In addition to sustaining your company’s continued development, scalable IT solutions can save you money in the long-run; you don’t waste money on hardware or software that you don’t need. Because scalable solutions can accommodate rapid changes, they also help you stay productive, free from unnecessary downtime. And they remain responsive to your needs, both short-term and long-term. You remain better prepared for whatever changes your company faces in the future.

Cultivating and maintaining scalability is a challenge, and only a high-quality MSP can help you meet it successfully. To further discuss scalability, please contact us. When we work as your MSP, we provide you with IT solutions that are tailored to your company. We’re always on the lookout for new technologies that enable you to benefit from scalability in a cost-effective way. You won’t have to worry about IT solutions that are unnecessarily inflexible and keep your company from reaching its full potential.

How Can Your Managed Service Provider (MSP) Help You Prepare For the Future?

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20160512

MSPs provide the necessary foresight to success.

Business 2 Community recently came out with an article discussing how a high-quality Managed Service Provider (MSP) can work like a superhero for your company.

The benefits of MSPs include an in-depth understanding of your network and IT infrastructure, and the intelligence and skill that they apply to your IT solutions. They can also fix many of your problems and keep things running without having to make regular on-site visits or take up your time.

The article describes an additional important benefit in the following way: “They can predict the future.”

How can your MSP help you prepare for the future?

Although MSPs aren’t fortune-tellers, they can still anticipate important changes that your company will need to prepare for and respond to. Their ability to predict future changes can save you money in the long run and give you an edge over competitors. As poorly prepared competitors scramble to react to changes last-minute, you’ll already have the necessary plans in place.

Let’s consider some examples of changes MSPs can help you anticipate:

  • Because they’re regularly following cyber security news, MSPs learn early on about emerging threats and potential vulnerabilities in various hardware and software solutions. They can help you calculate the risks posed by a given threat; these calculations will inform your decisions about the best cyber defenses for your company.
  • Networks are becoming considerably more complex, as an increasing number of devices develop Internet capabilities. These collections of smart devices that can share data with each other are called The Internet of Things. MSPs can anticipate how the Internet of Things will affect your industry. They’ll advise you on optimizing your devices and network, increasing your business productivity and keeping you ahead of competitors. They’ll also predict security vulnerabilities that arise when numerous Internet-enabled devices communicate with each other.
  • New IT solutions are emerging all the time. For example, businesses have a variety of options for backing up data. They can use local devices, cloud-based platforms, or frequently some combination of the two. What new solutions are becoming available and what are their strengths and drawbacks? How will you accommodate a growing volume of data that you need to protect and back up? MSPs help you plan for these changes. They will evaluate new IT solutions, predict the use of future technologies, and consider what will best benefit your company.
  • MSPs can predict what you’ll need based on your business objectives. If you want to shift direction in the next few years and dramatically boost your online presence, for example, MSPs can tell you what you’ll likely need now and in the future. The relevant solutions include responsive websites and secure e-commerce platforms.
  • An important part of IT maintenance is predicting when you’ll need to replace certain hardware and software. Even if you aren’t planning to make radical changes to your IT configuration, you’ll still need basic equipment replacement and software upgrades. Certain programs will expire, and you’ll need to renew software licenses or switch between providers. Your MSP can stay on top of all of these changes and work within your budget.

Without the foresight of high-quality MSPs, companies struggle to take full advantage of IT developments. They also leave themselves more vulnerable to cyber attacks and various IT failures, such as equipment outages and poorly performing software.

Don’t hesitate to contact us for the variety of manage services we offer. There are always new developments in IT, and many possibilities in the future for IT solutions that can transform your business operations and help you more easily achieve your objectives. MSPs can provide their services unobtrusively and round-the-clock, offering you guidance and support and ensuring that your IT decisions align with your company’s goals.

How a Managed Service Provider (MSP) Will Benefit Your Business

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Using a Managed Service Provider, like Systemsnet, removes the hassle of having an in-house IT department, while still having the IT support you need.

Using a Managed Service Provider, like Systemsnet, removes the hassle of having an in-house IT department, while still having the IT support you need.

Information Technology (IT) can be a hassle, and it is often the last thing a company wants to worry about. That is, until something goes wrong. And with IT, a lot can go wrong. Depending on the size of your business, you may have any number of computers, all networked together, VoIP phone systems that rely on the Internet, and active Internet connection that must be maintained at all times with all computers connected to that Internet connection for employee productivity. If it is running smoothly, IT is just running in the background and no one even notices it is there. But the second a phone line goes down or a computer hard drive starts acting funny, IT is the first group to get called, and it is all on them to make things right while the employee stands there impatiently waiting to get back to work. Without properly functioning IT, a business in the 21st century simply cannot operate.

So what do you do to make sure that your business’s IT is working all the time, without having to worry about the headaches that come with managing IT all the time? Your business needs to turn to a Managed Service Provider (MSP) such as SystemsNet. An MSP is a dedicated provider of IT services, hired by a company to handle all the details of that company’s Information Technology infrastructure. Their services will vary from client to client, depending on the client’s needs, but they often have the capability to handle any IT situation that may arise. This leaves the client free to handle the running of their business, and frees up resources that would otherwise be dedicated to an IT team that no longer is needed.

By hiring an MSP, a company is able to reduce their costs because they are contracting out the IT portion of their business. Any business knows that by contracting out something – whether it be work or IT – money will (usually) be saved. By contracting out the IT services of the business, the management is making a decision to let someone else handle all of the IT problems. Someone else will be on call 24×7 to fix IT problems, rather than having employees of the business on call to fix those problems. Because, let’s face it, a business is an around the clock operation in one way or another, and without an active IT system that is working around the clock, that business runs the risk of falling behind. An MSP will ensure that the IT systems will be operating at all times, whenever someone needs them. And by contracting these services out, the management is saving money because they are not paying for the benefits or overhead cost of the MSP employees – those costs are covered in the contract between the business and the Managed Service Provider.

The contract between the business at the MSP could be such that the business pays a flat monthly cost for all of the services that the two parties have agreed for the MSP to cover. More services, which could include computer hardware and software maintenance, phones, VoIP, and Internet, in addition to other IT needs, will generally require a higher monthly fee. But service plans may be bundled, so that a business receives multiple services for one rate, or picks and chooses individual services at individual rates. It is up to the business, and the operational standards of the MSP, to work out the details of the contract under which the work will be carried out, but it is nearly certain that the business will be saving money and receiving a valuable service because they will not be responsible for the day-to-day operation of the IT infrastructure and ensuring that it is working at all times for their employees. They leave all of that up to the contracted MSP.

If you are interested in exploring the options that SystemsNet can offer your business as an Managed Service Provider, please contact us, and we would be happy to discuss with you how we can not only save you money on IT management, but resources on not managing your IT yourself.

10 quick tips about working with your Managed Service Provider (MSP)

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To take full advantage of the benefits of an MSP, you need to maintain a strong relationship with them.

To take full advantage of the benefits of an MSP, you need to maintain a strong relationship with them.

By outsourcing at least some of your IT operations to a Managed Service Provider (MSP), you could potentially save money and further your business growth.

However, to take full advantage of these benefits, you need to maintain a strong working relationship with your MSP. The following are 10 quick tips about working with your Managed Service Provider (MSP):

 

 

 

  1. Share your business goals with them. They can help you most effectively only if they understand what direction you want your company to go in and anticipate how your IT needs might change along the way.
  2. Keep communication lines open. Regularly touch base with them about your IT configuration, whether everything’s going smoothly, and whether anything could improve or needs to change.
  3. Understand what they’re doing for you. You don’t need to know all of the technical details, but you should understand the general picture of what they’re doing for you and why it’s necessary, even if you don’t consider yourself a computer savvy person. If they’re good communicators, they can explain to you what’s going on.
  4. Establish clear collaborative boundaries from the beginning. Understand the scope of their responsibilities from the start. And if you have an IT staff already, establish a relationship of collaboration and clear boundaries, to avoid a situation where your in-house employees think the MSP is pushing them out of the picture.
  5. Hammer out a clear contract. Make sure you know how long they’ll work for you, how they’ll bill you, and what devices, programs and services they’ll take responsibility for.
  6. Quantify results. How will you measure increased productivity, savings in costs, or other benefits you might expect from your MSP? What is your MSP’s response time to various problems?
  7. Keep being a manager. Even when you outsource various services, you still need to stay on top of things and make informed decisions.
  8. Look into security. When you outsource your IT needs, in whole or part, to another company, you want to ensure as much as possible that your security won’t get compromised. What powerful security practices does your MSP have in place? What’s their security record?
  9. Ask away. You should feel comfortable asking them questions and bringing your concerns to them immediately.
  10. Treat them with trust. This doesn’t mean blindly accepting everything they do or suggest; however, if you’ve taken the trouble to choose a reliable and effective MSP, you should also feel comfortable delegating things to them and not second-guessing everything they do. By following the other tips here, such as communicating regularly and quantifying various results, you can monitor their contribution to your company without potentially obstructing their work.

Don’t hesitate to contact us for more information about the managed services we offer. When collaborating with us, you will receive IT services responsive to your company’s needs and aimed at promoting its survival and success.