What Problems Can Hiring An MSP Solve?
MSPs, or Managed IT Service Providers basically do what the label says: they provide managed IT services for small and medium sized businesses (SMBs). However, you might rightfully still be wondering what that really means, and how these services will materially impact your day to day operations.
In this article we’re going to touch on the specific solutions that MSPs offer and how they can help your small business grow!
Increase staff productivity
When you hire a new team member you expect them to be good at their job. That might be sales, customer support, management, or accounting – but they have been chosen for their area of expertise. However, it’s not reasonable to expect them to additionally serve as tech support experts, keeping their computer updated and troubleshooting problems as they arise!
MSPs allow your team to focus on their job – reducing downtime and keeping interruptions to a minimum. Instead of having your sales team diagnose technical issues outside of their purview, your MSP can handle that more quickly and efficiently!
By having someone on your team that understands your hardware as well as the ins and outs of your software means you’ll have fewer problems and fewer support calls to software vendors. Better still, in the event that a problem does need to be escalated to the software vendor IT support, it will be handled by technical experts who “speak the same language” as your vendor’s support staff.
Additionally, MSPs have the skills to implement automation routines, simplifying your team’s workload and avoiding errors. Instead of logging routine data by hand or manually populating the same fields in a common document, an automated process can take care of these quotidian chores and give your team extra time to accomplish more meaningful tasks.
Save you from staffing headaches
One of the most common reasons that small businesses don’t have their own in-house IT departments is that hiring IT staff is notoriously difficult and expensive! Good IT staff command eye-watering salaries and many small businesses simply don’t have enough work to justify the expense of an employee who only handles routine IT, computer, or phone issues. Even if your business does have the workload for a dedicated IT professional, hiring the right individual can be a nightmare if you don’t understand the industry.
For example, if a SMB has its own servers it will need someone who is able to properly provision hardware to successfully virtualize their server environment. This word salad of a sentence basically means that you’re looking for someone who has the know-how to select and set up the goldilocks of server hardware. Get too much hardware and you’ll pay more money for a depreciating asset which your company won’t ever fully utilize. Get too little hardware and your entire office will experience frustrating slowdowns!
Some business owners might think that they can choose the right person by certifications alone – for example a VMWare certified professional should have the knowledge to select the right hardware for a virtual server. However, increasingly, services like VMWare are choosing a pricing model that only the largest companies can afford. After their recent purchase by Broadcom, VMWare’s services have increased in price by up to 1,200% – and the company has publicly stated they’re primarily interested in Fortune 500 tier clients.
This means that SMBs looking to implement cloud services can feel forced to find a new hire who knows the ins-and-outs of a cloud solution that meets your business goals. Finding this unicorn technician who is also available to handle daily IT problems, implement disaster recovery plans, and help your remote work employees troubleshoot their log-in errors can be an expensive and time consuming search.
And unfortunately this brings us to the final difficulty in hiring IT staff: Put politely, many resumes are more aspirational than accurate. It is surprisingly common for IT professionals to include software and skills on their resumes which they have only had passing experience with. For business owners unfamiliar with the modern IT environment it can be hard to figure out which candidate is prepared to handle their business needs.
All of this isn’t to say that it is impossible to find new hires for your business’s in-house IT department, but it is reasonable to expect the process to be time consuming and expensive. MSPs vastly simplify this process by providing you with an entire team of IT professionals. Instead of needing the jack-of-all trades team member, your MSP grants you access to expertise across a wide range of IT issues.
Minimize Downtime
One of the most important roles your business’s managed service provider plays is keeping your business online. For most businesses the costs of going offline for even a few hours can represent a significant hit to your profits as payroll costs continue even as your business operations come to a halt!
Your MSP’s will implement strategies which minimize the risk of downtime and in the event that an outage happens they have the resources to react quickly and help you get back up and running. By working with an MSP you’ll have an entire IT team ready to help get your business back online if disaster strikes, compared to the one-person IT departments that are in the budget for typical small businesses.
Help plan and budget for growth
One easily overlooked benefit of outsourcing your IT to an MSP is how they facilitate budgetary planning. Even a non-tech focussed business will have computers, network switches, servers, and software licenses which all cost money.
For a growing company it can be challenging to purchase this equipment as whatever you buy to meet today’s needs will soon become insufficient – while overbuying means under utilizing expensive equipment until your business meets its growth targets.
With an MSP your IT needs, including hardware, become a fixed line item on your budget sheet that can be accounted for.
Transitioning your IT costs from capital expenditures to operational expenditures makes it easy to plan for the future and grow your business.
Getting the most out of your IT budget
A common challenge of IT is determining where your budget should go. Computers get old and slow, servers need to be upgraded, and the developer of your business software is probably releasing major updates every few years which may require costly migrations.
To make the economic assessment even more challenging is that in very few cases do any of these pieces of hardware directly generate revenue for your company!
Instead of guessing which upgrade to go with first, an experienced MSP will have the knowledge to help you identify which upgrades are going to be the best use of your resources.
Minimize Cybersecurity Threats
The risks posed by cyberattacks and malware are hard to overstate. Only 8% of companies hit by ransomware recover their data and the average cost of a data breach for small and medium sized businesses is over 3 million dollars. These facts taken together mean that businesses without adequate cybersecurity often fail to financially recover – making prevention absolutely essential.
Your MSP will proactively identify your business’s network vulnerabilities and take steps to mitigate these risks, as well as help you develop business continuity plans. By having a regularly updated backup and restoration plan your business will be able to weather a catastrophe like a ransomware attack that may have otherwise shuttered your business.
Network security is one of those things that is virtually impossible to do after the fact. Protecting your business from disruptions requires getting your IT infrastructure set up correctly the first time – as not all businesses survive to get a second chance.
Assist with compliance laws
While the healthcare industry gets the most attention when it comes to data storage and privacy compliance (HIPAA) – any data collection comes with its own legal responsibilities! Some lesser known data compliance acronyms include FINRA, SOX, and GDPR – and a surprising number of businesses fall under these regulations.
By working with an MSP you’ll be able to focus on running your business instead of trying to stay abreast of regulatory changes and implementing necessary updates to remain compliant!
Reap the Benefits of a Managed Service Provider
For small and medium sized businesses it is hard to beat a managed service provider when it comes to IT solutions. From simplifying hiring, to providing scalable solutions that grow as your company grows, to implementing advanced security solutions and data backups which keep your business safe – MSPs provide myriad benefits.
Are you ready to streamline your IT solutions, improve your network security measures, and simplify your business processes? Bristeeri Technologies provides managed IT services to small businesses in the South Carolina Midlands and is here to help.