Why managed service providers (MSPs) will be key to your future growth

The global business landscape is transforming at the speed of thought, with an increasing influx of innovative and disruptive technologies. The ongoing digitalization, moreover, has emerged as a catalyst accelerating the adoption and deployment of these futuristic solutions, while simultaneously adding to the overall value chain. Given this, immersive experiences, frictionless interactions, intensive personalization through AI, predictive event-thinking, verifiable business modelling, and tailoring of every other in-house and customer-facing process has become a veritable market norm.

This is pressing enterprises to drive greater specialization into individual business functions and make them more effective and efficient in the due process.

Today, this specialization is increasingly becoming a core component to ensure survivability of a business in the competitive market landscape. This is, perhaps, also where MSPs step into the picture. MSPs, or Managed Service Providers, are market players in the IT domain that handle specialized business functions on the behalf of a company through outsourcing. With the increasing complexity of cloud-based services, one of the challenges which MSPs address is developing the right mix of on-premises IT, private, and public cloud to support business needs. As their added advantage, MSPs not only facilitate a smoother transition for businesses into these challenging domains more cost-effectively, they also bring their in-depth industry expertise and technical know-how in managing these processes thereupon.

This approach substantially decreases the workload of an organization and enables it to narrow down its focus on other critical market-facing processes and business innovations.

MSPs have emerged as an inevitable part of any modern organization’s journey towards success. Listed below are a few vital benefits offered by MSPs for businesses looking to attain optimum operational efficiency through a comprehensive digital transformation:

Business-first perspective

MSPs allow organizations to spend their energy on driving their business forward by managing their comprehensive suite of IT services. From end-user services scaling up to data centre services and everything in between, MSPs take care of all the challenging issues in today’s tech-driven market, so that businesses are free to focus on innovation, product development, and growth strategies. Their primary emphasis is on delivering quantifiable results through the perfect confluence of the business proposition and its underlying technology. This is achieved by following a two-pronged approach – first, MSPs understand the business operations and the value proposition, and then they create and maintain an equilibrium between a business’s strategy and service aptitude.

This approach enables MSPs to develop an IT strategy that meets the business goals of an organization with greater precision.

Security postures

Organizations are now in a hyper-aware state regarding IT security and are keener than ever to gain assistance with their security management needs post the cyber attacks like WannaCry and NotPetya, and most recently the Equifax breach. When an enterprise falls victim to security breaches like malware, ransomware, and virus attacks, immediate help is required not just to restore daily operations but to also recover lost data and improve the vulnerability postures. MSPs bring in the experience and expertise, the best in technology partnerships for proving best-in-class solutions, and they are abreast with the ever-changing and challenging security landscape.

Increasingly specialized technologies

Businesses today are looking to embrace tech-based solutions as a service. The advent of chatbots for customer engagement, AI-based data accumulation and analysis, automation in production and manufacturing, etc. – all these aspects require specific expertise in the skillset, toolset, and mindset of the workforce. MSPs are best equipped to provide the domain-specific specialists and also bring in experience and expertise in the specialized technology domains.

Operational efficiency

MSPs augment the operational efficiency of an organization by allowing its IT staff to focus on strategic initiatives and technological planning while offloading the operational aspects of such initiatives to them. They ensure better business continuity of operations.

Infrastructure optimization

Infrastructure can be optimized only if a business has a thorough assessment of everything that’s already in place. This makes audit of the existing IT infrastructure, which is a complex process, extremely valuable. MSPs can effectively help businesses identify the weaknesses present in their IT infrastructure and determine areas where further optimization is needed. This, as mentioned earlier, also frees internal IT resources for projects where their individual expertise and business understanding is needed more. Doing so can help in aligning IT with the business objectives of a company.

The best part is that these MSPs enable businesses to scale-up or downsize their IT needs as per their need using the cloud, hence saving them from needless expenses for infrastructural deployments.

Domain expert consultants

With organizations becoming increasingly multi-functional, the need for domain-specific expertise, both in terms of workforce and tools utilized, has increased manifold. Considering this scenario, more enterprises are bringing in MSPs as part of their IT mix, to enable groups of employees to focus on strategic projects. As aggregators of services from various domain-specific high-quality providers, MSPs also provide clients with an option to choose the best available alternative for their business from those available.

Standard processes and SLAs

MSPs provide services as per Service Level Agreements (SLAs) that define the level of service expected in a particular period of time. By laying out all the metrics beforehand, they provide greater accountability and assurance to businesses which are already apprehensive of employing third-party technological resources. This is a critical component of any contract with a technology-based MSP that makes it easier for businesses to prepare their strategies and future policies considering the goals mentioned in the SLA. Standardization and streamlining of processes also help a business minimize its ‘time-to-market’ as standardization ensures greater stability, predictability, and flexibility of operations.

Shrinking capital budgets, rising competition, and rapid technological progress are making it increasingly difficult for businesses to just keep up with the trends. In such a scenario, MSPs, due to their predictable expense and gamut of services, are a boon to organizations looking to implement cutting-edge business practices to enhance revenues. Post partnering with MSPs, organizations can rely on them to do the heavy lifting, foster innovation, and optimize operations, without having to fight an increasingly uphill battle all alone.

Prateek Garg is the Founder, Managing Director, and Chief Executive Officer of Progressive Infotech, the preferred Managed Services Provider in India.

(Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of YourStory.)