Working with a Managed Services Provider (MSP) has a lot of benefits for your organisation — simplifying policy and compliance, tightening your cybersecurity and optimising your network performance. At the end of the day, this all boils down to one thing: saving your business money. After all, failed compliance, security leaks or network downtime can all have far-reaching implications and costs.
In this article, we’ll talk about how exactly an MSP can not only save your organisation money but open opportunities to increase capital.
An MSP is a third-party company that remotely manages the IT infrastructure and end-user systems of other organisations. Think of an MSP as a proactive partner that establishes, optimises and monitors your networks and systems to achieve the best outcome for your organisation.
MSPs can replace an in-house IT team, or work alongside an existing team to provide extra resources, external expertise or support in areas your IT team may not specialise in.
Working with an MSP is an alternative to on-demand outsourcing, wherein you would approach a third-party IT company when something has broken. On-demand outsourcing is a reactive model, patching issues as they occur. Using an MSP is a proactive model, employing oversight and monitoring systems to reduce the risk of issues occurring in the first place, and creating highly responsive processes for addressing any issues that do occur as quickly as possible.
Many business decision-makers may feel hesitant to pay for an MSP when they have an in-house IT team or prefer not to spend money on external support until it’s absolutely necessary. Unfortunately, this kind of reactive spending can be harder to budget and balance and can take some time to rectify issues, as contractors may need briefing, access and approvals, and time to familiarise themselves with your systems.
Working with an NSP is a proactive approach, which means while you may be spending money before something goes wrong, you gain a better picture of your actual costs and save money through faster response times and outsourced overheads.
We discuss how MSPs save you money below.
Read more: How do I choose the best Managed Services Provider?
In-house IT can get very expensive, very quickly. Quality hardware alone — computers, servers and more — is a hefty expense that needs to be kept up to date, and then you add the cost of software, salaries and benefits for IT employees, on-premise space for your IT team, and it all adds up.
With an MSP, all of this is provided in your annual fees. Your MSP is using the hardware, software and IT expertise as the core of their business. That means not only are their costs distributed across their client base, thereby reducing what you spend, but they also keep their technology and skills up-to-date.
There’s no upside to downtime. It’s a money sink — your systems go down and your staff are idle. Your customers are impacted and unhappy. Every minute of downtime costs you in wages and revenue, not to mention reputational damage and productivity.
An MSP’s role is to monitor your network and systems proactively, ensuring that potential issues are addressed before they result in downtime. A great MSP has monitoring software and response processes in place to immediately rectify minor issues before you’re even aware — of course, this comes with regular reporting to demonstrate value and keep you abreast of the threats your company faces.
A cybersecurity breach can be extremely costly. On top of the associated downtime, cybersecurity breaches can do massive reputational damage and result in a significant volume of lost business. American company UpGuard estimates that lost business contributes as much as 38% of the cost of a breach.
One of the greatest challenges with cybersecurity is that the landscape is constantly changing. Malicious hackers are getting more intelligent every day and it can be increasingly challenging for one-man IT bands to keep your security tight. An MSP has teams of cybersecurity professionals who are plugged into the latest changes in the space and can reinforce your security before a leak is sprung.
In addition to reducing costs, an MSP can create and support opportunities to grow your capital and keep your business ahead of the game. Here’s how an MSP can grow your bottom line.
If you’re not already on the cloud, migration is a great way to maximise your business productivity. A great MSP will connect your business to the cloud via a secure, reliable cloud platform that makes sense for your operations.
Bringing your systems into the cloud offers a huge number of benefits including:
All of these create a new way forward within your business to empower staff to work as productively as possible, enhance customer experience and ultimately drive profits.
With all the savings brought about from the proactive approach of an MSP, you’ll have more budget available to channel into business growth. In many cases, IT is not the main focus of a business but is required to ensure data is secure and compliant, and systems are reliable. So, a huge IT budget can feel like a necessary evil that detracts from spending on a business’s core functions.
An MSP offers hardware, software and expertise that you don’t have to fully invest in, freeing up large portions of your budget for what matters to your business.
Business growth is exciting, but it’s also challenging. It comes with a great number of costs and difficulties associated with training or hiring staff, procuring new hardware and systems, and developing new policies and processes — and that’s just the IT costs.
MSPs can make growth easier and more affordable by scaling with you. Odds are you’re not demanding the full capability of your MSP, so when your demands grow, they can reassign resources to match those demands seamlessly. The result is a smoother, more affordable growth process.
NSP is a Managed Services Provider with a difference. We’ve been empowering the success of businesses globally since 2002, but we’ve never lost what makes us stand apart: we’re a New Zealand owned and operated business, through and through. We take a business-first approach, centring your core functions and working the IT to enable and strengthen your business — not overtake it.
We leverage IT systems and cybersecurity to effect total business success — and that’s where you come in. Get in touch with us for a free consultation to find out how NSP can protect and grow your business’s bottom line.