Managed Services for Startups, Small and Medium Businesses

Benefits of hiring an MSP

• 24/7 on-demand support. The MSP is responsible for supporting the client’s IT needs anytime. 24/7/365 coverage is a common requirement for companies that run their business online or globally. Some modern MSPs provide real-time communication with their clients via instant messaging communication tools and other channels.
• Cost-effective. The price for an MSP offering is usually a fraction of the costs of dedicated resources. An MSP frees up more budget for other areas and allows organizations to focus on their core business instead of their IT needs.
• Simplified IT expense and billing. Most of the MSP packages cover all the IT needs of your business. Startups and small and medium-sized companies benefit from the MSP offerings since the billing consolidation and subscription model pricing help allocate a fixed cost for the services, thus facilitating budget allocation and streamlining expenses.
• Highly qualified and experienced MSP staff. Good MSPs continuously invest in the development of the skills and training of their personnel. This model provides access to a full team of technology experts with a variety of skills and certifications.
• Proactive IT monitoring and management. A critical characteristic of the MSP offering is that infrastructure capacity, service scaling, and availability are taken care of proactively, reducing the number of service outages substantially. A robust MSP provides a more holistic monitoring approach. The central areas are network monitoring, IT infrastructure monitoring, and application monitoring.
• Software updates and patches. These tasks are also proactively executed. Moreover, as technology advances, an MSP will help you stay up to date. Installing updates and patches is also a crucial task in addressing security vulnerabilities.
• On-premise, multi-hosting, and multi-Cloud support. Startups use cloud-based technologies as their primary strategy to build and host their software solutions, receiving immediate benefits like pay-as-you-go pricing and elasticity, among others. Traditional small and medium businesses opt-in for more conservative options like on-premise hosting, owning the data center, or multi-hosting, having their software and applications with different hosting providers. More complex scenarios are hybrid hosting topologies that combine on-premises or other hosting providers with one or more cloud platforms. Multi-cloud solutions are popular as well. A good example is to have SaaS products like Salesforce integrated with Active Directory in Azure for user access that feeds a data lake in AWS. An MSP can manage access and perform user onboarding tasks to different Clouds and manage platforms like AWS, Azure, and Google cloud at the same time.
• Disaster Recovery optimization and execution. Data backups and restoration are standard MSP practices. Besides, some MSPs can help create a solid recovery plan and perform periodic tests required for some standards and regulatory entities.
• IT Security Compliance. Data backups are stored securely, encrypted, and role access policies. MSP personnel also are responsible for applying security patches, maintenance, log management, and network security best practices that facilitate IT security audit verifications.

Common types of Managed Services

There are different types of Managed Services on the market. Depending on the business IT needs a scope, the company may outsource a single service to an MSP or decide to contract a more comprehensive multi-service package. Here are the different types of Managed Services:

• Managed networks or infrastructure. These services eliminate the cost of owning and running a data center. They focus mainly on network technologies and appliances. Management of VPNs, subnetting, load balancers, Internet, firewalls, and NAT devices, among other equipment, is provided for the network. Application hosting, servers, and storage are part of this category. One significant benefit is that the MSP will help the organization reduce the total cost of ownership of the IT infrastructure and operations.
• Managed application services. Like networks and infrastructure, these services focus on providing a cost-effective management solution for software and applications. Many applications need to guarantee a constant SLA in performance metrics for customer experience purposes. These apps need to scale in and out, failover, and fix any outage or delay in responses.
• Managed Cloud platforms. The MSP personnel manage the client’s computing, storage, networks, servers, and operating systems. It also may include controlling the tools and application stacks like web servers, package software, databases, and DevOps tools that run on top of that infrastructure. Clients with multiple Cloud solutions and platforms can delegate the management of all these areas to one MSP.
• Managed support services. The MSP handles traditional help desk responsibilities, including trouble ticketing for IT problems among employees and resolution mechanisms.
• Managed security services. This type of Managed Service provides a broad range of solutions like patching and updating installations, malware prevention, email and spam filtering, incident management, and remediation.

Managed Services for Startups, Small and Medium Businesses

Managed Services are an excellent option for startups and small and medium businesses. The benefits of hiring an MSP depend on the type of business, the IT needs, and the corporate culture, but there are many scenarios where an MSP would be a great fit.

Whether an organization needs to address IT complexity, offload the work of IT Management, or add a new Cloud infrastructure and applications, Managed Services are one of the most cost-effective options. MSPs always allow companies to focus on other business areas while maintaining state-of-the-art proactive IT support.