Episode I – Managed Services: A New Hope For Your Technology

Leia Organa owns a small business with 20 full-time employees. She has a server, a firewall, two wireless access points, a switch, and her employees each have a laptop and a personal Droid phone. As a small business owner, she needs her employees to stay productive and efficient, but her network has become latent, troublesome, and unreliable. She has enough on her plate already, and doesn’t want to worry about managing her infrastructure, so she has begun exploring her options. She could hire an internal IT person, but that comes with an overhead cost and time commitment to train. Or, she could outsource these IT needs to an experienced, knowledgeable Managed Services Provider (MSP). 

In Episode I of this 5-part saga, we introduce you to the world of managed services, the benefits, and how it can help you focus on larger initiatives instead of day-to-day maintenance and support. 

What are managed services?

Utilizing current technologies, managed services often offer proactive management and strategic guidance on streamlining your IT operations. Examples of managed services include:

• Active monitoring: 24×7 monitoring for critical infrastructure through remote management and alerting 
• Preemptive remediation: Proactive server and workstation maintenance, automation, and patch management
• Issue response: 24×7 help desk access and end-user issue resolution
• Cloud tools and services: Security monitoring, data backups, anti-spam, anti-virus, anti-malware, and anti-ransomware

Benefits of using managed services.

By outsourcing your IT needs to an experienced MSP, you gain access to extensive technological expertise, industry-leading certifications, and predictable IT costs. Some of the benefits of using a managed service include:

• Adaptability: The ability to adapt to changes in your environment, like staff or infrastructure
• Round-the-clock support: 24×7 help desk support and monitoring utilizing industry best practices to obtain service level agreements
• Flexibility: A managed service should be able to manage your entire infrastructure, or augment your existing IT staff
• Predictability: A simple, firm fixed price to make your IT expenses predictable and easy to budget
• Experience: Services are delivered by certified engineers and subject matter experts

Through these features, Leia Organa is able to offload the risk in IT management to an experienced provider allowing her to stay focused on her business. Little does she know, however, that the power behind these services will make her infrastructure more efficient than ever before. In Episode II, we witness the epic technological battle between time-consuming general IT maintenance and support, and the force of endpoint management.