The new normal has led organizations to embrace digital transformation sooner than expected. This has helped the digital-adept businesses to outpace their less-aware competitors. This race has led to an increase in demand for MSPs who can enable customers to undertake digital transformation, accelerate business growth, and stay ahead of their digital-adept brethren.
Managed Services Providers (MSPs) are specialized IT Services companies hired to monitor and maintain a company’s IT environment that constitutes Infrastructure, Applications, and Security. Managed services enable organizations to augment competencies that they lack, or to replace functions or processes that incur huge recurring costs. These services optimize in-house IT costs, transform IT systems, and automate business processes, thus, enabling enterprises to attain their business objectives.
Hiring an MSP would be a smart move for an enterprise, however misconceptions and fallacies about MSPs might cloud their judgement. So, here are top 5 myths about MSPs – BUSTED!
- MSP will burn a hole in our pockets
The most common myth about MSPs is that they are very expensive and would cost an organization a fortune to hire and manage one. In reality, it is just the opposite. MSPs take complete ownership of your IT landscape and provide you with best-in-class IT support and assistance at a comparable or lesser cost than your own cost-of-ownership. The cost of managing an MSP is significantly lower compared to the overall cost of infrastructure, resources, training and skill development, constant application upgrades, and most important, time.
Think of it this way – To make your travel more convenient, what is more cost effective – buying a car or using ride sharing services? Obviously, the cost of ownership, maintenance, parts, wear-and-tear, depreciation, and insurance of a car is colossal compared to what you would pay for a ride-service and get the same or better experience.
What’s more, you can keep demanding more from such experiences and you may enjoy benefits of bringing a loyal customer, just like you enjoy cashbacks from ride-sharing services. MSPs can enable you to optimize the application and infrastructure footprint and reduce the total cost of management per application significantly. MSPs do so by increasing the level of automation and replacing legacy applications with new-age applications such as progressive web applications.
- MSP will replace our Internal IT team
An MSP doesn’t replace an internal IT team. In fact, it enables them to enhance their capabilities. MSP liberates the IT team from arduous and repetitive tasks, and enables them to focus on tasks that are more productive. MSP greatly reduces the workload on an organization’s in-house team, thereby helping to streamline business and maximize efficiency. An MSP is not a threat. It is a support system for the internal IT team. Most companies view MSPs as enablers that help IT to reprioritize its role.
- Our data is at risk
With the recent WFM mandate, data breaches and cyber threats have only multiplied. It is now imperative for organizations to be updated about the technological advances in data security in order to predict and prevent cyber-attacks which might, at times, lead to irreversible reputational damage. Security may neither be their forte, nor are they expected to be security experts. Hence, it is only beneficial for an organization to leverage such capabilities of MSPs to secure their data, perform rigorous tests, and create a robust and resilient security ecosystem. MSP helps an organization to build cloud security rules of engagement and design a secure and compliant environment that protect services and data seamlessly.
- We won’t have much control over our operations
Contrary to the popular belief, hiring an MSP does not lead to dilution of control and decision-making authority. The company can decide the level of delegation and authority that they wish to accord to the MSP. An effective customer-MSP relationship requires setting clear expectations, a scope of services and a strong service level agreement (SLA). A good MSP will have suggestions and recommendations in accordance with the customer’s requirements and expectations, and will always serve as an extension to their existing business.
- It will lead to conflicts over roles and responsibilities
Businesses with clear understanding of their objectives and vision will never face such problems. Onboarding an MSP is a huge decision and should be carried out with clarity of thought. Organizations need to be clear about the roles and responsibilities of the MSP before getting them onboard. There should be a clear distinction between roles and responsibilities of both the parties. Eventually, the organization and the MSP must collaborate, and work together to achieve organizational objectives.
