Managed Services Provider (MSP)
The most obvious difference is their approach. An MSP adopts a proactive approach. To prevent any possible problems, an MSP takes preventive actions. It keeps an eye on your IT equipment and systems. If there are any potential problems, an MSP will receive the alerts immediately. Hence, you will not encounter any trouble. In contrast, Break-Fix takes a reactive approach. This type of solution deals with your difficulties on a case-by-case basis. The company can only help you solve problems that have already occurred. During maintenance, failures in IT equipment and systems can affect your work and can cause you to suffer losses.
Benefits
MSP is not only benefiting the boss, but it also benefits to its staff. To learn more about the solution, here are the needs of different people:
Entrepreneurs’ perspective
As one of the difficulties of SMEs is lack of finance, recruiting IT professionals are costly. Hiring in-house staff will increase your expenses as well as a financial burden. With our cost-effective MSP solutions, you only need to pay predictable monthly fees to receive IT expertise from us. Therefore, you can cut down and convert the costs into operating expenses.
Suffering from downtime and wasting a lot of time on repairs is a nightmare. Many jobs have to be suspended. To make sure your business runs smoothly, we take preventative measures to help you avoid various types of problems, such as data storage, computer viruses and software update. Since your IT devices and systems are connected to ours, both can be monitored 24 hours a day. In this case, our competent IT technicians can instantly detect and settle potential problems. This minimises the impact on your business operation and increases productivity.
When you enlarge your business size, you need to upgrade your existing computer equipment and systems. You may have to concern about whether in-house IT staff have the capability to support your business growth. No one knows if they have made the right decisions until there is a problem. Therefore, you will need an MSP that can provide you with the most suitable service instantly, according to your business needs. And your business growth will not be hindered.
With 24/7 monitoring, all the IT problems you may face will be solved by IT experts. You do not need to worry about any unexpected issues. Hence, you have more time to concentrate on your business development.
Admin & HR’s perspective
According to our clients’ experience, most of their administrative staff and HR staff are required to handle IT affairs. However, not all of them have relevant IT skills. It leads to a situation where the employees need to spend extra time studying IT knowledge. With an MSP, they can focus on their own work.
Since all IT staff in an MSP company are experts, they can help you solve various difficulties effectively. Therefore, the HR Department does not need to help the in-house staff to register for additional IT training courses.
One of the responsibilities of the HR Department is staffing. It is difficult for SMEs to hire IT professions. Before hiring employees, HR staff need to do a lot of preparatory work, such as job ads and interviews. And you cannot be sure when an employee will resign. If the staff always leave your company, the department will waste lots of money and time in the hiring process. An MSP can provide you with a stable workforce without hiring them. Hence, the HR staff do not have to be troubled by the hiring process.
IT Department’s perspective
Most SMEs have very few or even only one IT staff. IT technicians at SMEs are responsible for numerous tasks, such as front desk, programming and systems analysts. It is a heavy burden for them to handle all IT-related tasks. If the company can outsource certain jobs to an MSP, the in-house staff do not have to manage an overwhelming workload and have a pleasant work environment.
As mentioned above, an MSP can reduce your office workload. This not only creates a positive work environment for internal IT staff, but it can also improve work efficiency. You can have more time to concentrate on important projects, for instance, software development and infrastructure. Meanwhile, you can learn more about your company’s IT needs and thus improve related issues.
There are many types of IT problems. If your company has encountered some severe problems, you may not have enough experience and skills to resolve it. Under this circumstance, highly skilled IT experts from MSP can lend a hand to solve all of these problems.
For SMEs, they have a greater chance and easier to enlarge their business size. In this case, the computing systems and hardware are required to upgrade so that these can support the business develop. It is very time consuming if you do not know what you need to do. As an MSP serves companies with different business sizes, their staff have great experience and have a better understanding of your needs. They can assist you in upgrading the devices and systems based on your actual demands.
When there are very few people in your development, especially for the department with only one staff, it is very hard for them to request leave at work. This is because the entire company relies on them. If they are on leave, no one can handle IT-related work. However, an MSP can back you up. The staff at MSP are on hand to support your IT equipment and systems. This is a win-win situation. The in-house staff can ask for leave time while the computer devices and systems can remain functional.