According to a recent MarketsandMarkets forecast, the global managed services market will grow from $223 billion in 2020 to $329.1 billion by 2025, at a CAGR of 8.1%. The key drivers of growth of managed services offerings in 2021 and beyond include the high adoption of cloud, automation, analytics, and other disruptive technologies; lack of IT skilled professionals; and spending cuts leading to lower IT budgets.
The technology landscape has transformed more in 2020 than in the past several years. Consequently, technology has evolved significantly since the days of break/fix IT, and the reality is that most internal IT teams aren’t sufficiently equipped to keep up with the ongoing rapid pace of innovation. As a result, many organizations find their IT to be reactive instead of proactive, thereby their systems struggle to keep pace with the demands of a growing business in a digital-first world.
Managed Services, wherein you outsource IT support to a third-party provider, enables organizations to keep pace with a fast-changing world, reduce costs, ensure round-the-clock support, safeguard business-critical data, and achieve a lot more. There are numerous benefits of Managed Services, especially if you’re using Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Azure. However, before diving into the core benefits of the managed services model, let us go over the basics first.
What are Managed Services?
Managed cloud services refer to outsourcing your daily IT administration and management responsibilities to a third-party vendor to automate and enhance business operations. Often, internal IT departments don’t possess the skills to effectively monitor and maintain a cloud environment and application stack. In these situations, organizations might leverage the Managed Services model to manage cloud security, computing, storage, network operations, application stacks, and much more. Depending on an organization’s IT requirements, Managed Service Providers (MSPs) can also handle monitoring and reporting, performance testing, backup and recovery, and more. With fixed monthly pricing, hiring an MSP is often less expensive and more efficient than depending on an in-house team.
6 Great Benefits of Partnering with an MSP
Are you thinking of outsourcing IT administration and management to an MSP? Here are some advantages of choosing a Managed Services expert:
1: Reduce Costs
According to a recent survey by a technology non-profit organization, CompTIA, 96% of organizations reported saving a substantial amount annually — 184 businesses noticed cost reductions of 25% or more, and 58 saw over 50% reduction in costs. Managed services lower labor costs and eliminates the cost of hiring and training new IT staff. The ability to possess skills available on a scalable basis is a compelling benefit of the model, and most MSPs offer a hybrid model of onshore and offshore resources, which lowers the average effective rate and widens your resource base.
The Managed Service engagement is based on a service-level agreement tailored to meet an organization’s unique needs, ensuring that you’ll never have to worry about unexpected service costs. This will enable your organization to shift from a capital expense model to an operating cost model.
2: Gain Agility
Technology is in a constant state of flux, wherein today’s innovation quickly becomes tomorrow’s legacy. To keep pace with this change, organizations need to scale their systems either up or down. While Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Azure are highly scalable by design, but you may still require additional assistance. MSPs can respond to changes in demand in real-time, so you never have to worry about system downtime. Be sure to partner with an MSP that not only has experienced consultants available but also offers advanced services such as upgraded services release management, proactive monitoring, reporting, and more to get the best value and scalability out of the partnership.
3: Avoid Downtime
A Gartner study suggests that network downtime can cost businesses as much as $5,600 per minute — that’s well over $300k per hour. Organizations can avoid expensive downtime by partnering with an expert MSP. A core benefit of Managed Services is that rather than sit and wait for something to go wrong, reputed MSPs take a proactive stance to maintenance. MSPs use remote monitoring and management to identify, diagnose, and troubleshoot potential problems before they ever have a chance to become an issue. In the unlikely instance, if things do go wrong, an MSP can provide expert backup and disaster recovery services to get the systems back online.
4: Receive Round-the-clock Support
Most MSPs offer 24X7 flexibility, on-call options, and weekend support, therefore there is no need to worry about availability. Organizations can expect quick response and resolution times for raised service requests. However, while searching for a perfect MSP, you would want to choose a global service provider that can support multiple time zones and offer round-the-clock support, so you can rest assured that help is available whenever you need it.
5: Boost Security & Compliance
According to a Lloyd study, global cyber-attacks and virus threats could result in damages of $53.1 billion to $121.4 billion. Organizations today are generating an exponential amount of data daily, which when analyzed and utilized could transform business results. Towards this, your first task should be to protect all the business-critical data from growing risks of cyber-attacks and virus threats. An MSP constantly monitors and scans the network to identify and mitigate security risks. The proactive approach of MSPs helps organizations avert many security vulnerabilities. Though MSPs can’t handle corporate compliance needs, they can partner with your legal team to find out which regulations it should be aware of so that it can take precautions to ensure that your systems meet them.
6: Focus on Core Objectives
One of the important benefits of Managed Services is that it frees up employees to focus on the jobs they were hired to do. They do not have to worry about tackling additional technology responsibilities just to match the growth requirements of the organization. An experienced managed services partner will offer a flexible service model that allows you to determine what level of service you require, whether that means just outsourcing limited functions or outsourcing the organization’s entire IT department.
As a Microsoft Gold Partner and Cloud Solutions Provider (CSP), AgreeYa helps organizations in achieving quick issue resolution, planning assistance, infrastructure design guidance, and IT education through our Microsoft Managed Services. AgreeYa’s Managed services are modeled towards preventing the business-critical IT challenges and proactively addressing those as soon as they arise. With 20+ years of expertise in maintenance, support, and scaling of Microsoft-based business-critical applications and environment, AgreeYa can be your ideal Microsoft Managed Services Provider. Contact us today.