What is a Managed Service Provider And What Do They Do?

Although you might tend to consider business growth in terms of opening new locations or creating new products, you may not have considered how your IT can grow along with these things. It’s fair to say that most businesses in 2021 will struggle without a solid IT infrastructure.

But IT improvements don’t come cheap, so you’ll want to find an IT solution that doesn’t leave you bankrupt. The way to do this is by hiring a Managed Service Provider (or MSP) In this article, we’ll explain what they do, what they can provide for your company, and how you should choose the best one.

When you’ve finished reading, you’ll have a better idea of whether or not you’d like to explore working with an MSP—or look instead at building your in-house IT knowledge.

1. What is an MSP?

An MSP is an existing IT team that you can hire that works outside your regular office and isn’t on your payroll. Although they aren’t quite as present in your daily work environment as a dedicated in-house team would be, they can still provide comprehensive support and cover all of your IT needs.

While they might seem like a more complicated option than keeping everything in-house, an MSP can be a more simple option than bringing on your own IT team—you could even have one working for you in a week or so if you were to start; talk now! Because they have a diverse staff of professionals who work with a broad range of businesses, an MSP can easily add you on.

For your monthly payment, you are provided with the MSP’s IT team’s expertise at a lower cost than you might anticipate for their level of experience. This is because they aren’t just working for you; as they charge lots of companies a low price, they can spread staffing costs across all of the businesses that hire them, and this saving comes straight back to you.

2. Can an MSP save you money?

You probably have some awareness of how your business budgets every month, and if so, you’ll know just how fast costs can become astronomically high, especially when you include the recruitment drives required when you’re hiring new members of staff!

Putting aside the huge cost of wages each month, you can lose thousands to expenses that come from staffing, lost resources, and more, and these costs grow exponentially if you’re looking to bring on more people. And this is all without the training costs that come when new employees are on the payroll!

One of the more immediate benefits of working with an MSP is that you can completely avoid extra costs like these. The extensive hiring process has already been handled entirely by the provider.

But the benefits don’t just come in the short term; without these initial costs, think about what you could invest the extra thousands you now have in! You could invest in new product development, create a new and exciting marketing campaign, recruit more people in sales—the options are endless with the money you’ve saved on the monotony of the hiring process!

3. Can an MSP help with business expansion?

Now that we’ve established how you can put back the money saved from working with an MSP into wider business growth tactics, you can start to consider how you might grow your business by investing in IT innovations. Although it’s easy to see an MSP as just a group of people who keep your IT systems running, they can provide so much more for your business—that is, if you choose the right provider.

MSPs become an important part of a business’s daily operations, and this means that they’ll witness much of your growth over the time you work with them. In addition to this, they’ll have a cutting edge awareness of all of the latest IT developments, having implemented these technologies into the infrastructures of other companies they work with. Whether you want to use an SD-WAN system for your network or install MPLS to improve the performance of cloud-based applications, the right MSP can drastically improve your IT systems for the better.

While you may not be easy on these technologies, your chosen MSP and their knowledge of these innovations, could be instrumental in making sure your business can maintain the pace of growth you desire. This consultancy service might not be part of the most basic package that an MSP offers, but for just a fee, you can have access to their combined decades of IT experience and knowledge—an investment that will certainly pay off in the long term.

4. How Do You Find The Best MSP?

While there are a myriad of ways to grow your business, it all essentially comes down to expanding two areas: knowledge and money. If you decide to start working with an MSP, you’ll both gain access to their huge bank of knowledge and be able to start putting your money elsewhere.

However, this growth is only possible with a good provider. It would help if you looked further than the first few Google results that appear for ‘MSP in my area’; good knowledge of SEO doesn’t necessarily translate to IT’s good knowledge.

While you’re scouting out potential providers, it’s useful to ask if they’ve ever worked with companies that resemble your own, whether that’s in terms of their size or the industry that they operate in. You should also ask about their plans for future growth; after all, they need to be able to keep up with your ambitions!

To make the most of your relationship with an MSP, you need to make sure that they have a thorough understanding of your business. If you can form a solid and mutually beneficial working relationship, you can grow together to dizzying heights.