Viewpoint: When can your IT Program benefit from adding Managed Services?
Modern managed service offerings come in a variety of flavors and are becoming an increasingly valuable addition to IT programs of all sizes. This article helps you determine when to leverage managed services and highlights the key models to consider.
Managed services in a nutshell
Managed services involve outsourcing the management and support of IT infrastructure and applications to a third-party Managed Service Provider (MSP). The MSP handles changes, maintenance, and monitoring based on agreed service levels, freeing up your internal team to focus on strategic priorities.
Many businesses leverage some form of IT managed services, common examples are:
Infrastructure Support: MSPs can handle the nitty-gritty details of infrastructure and cloud management to keep everything running smoothly and perform tasks like cloud migration and optimization.
Security and Compliance Administration: Security is a critical area where managed services are often utilized to provide firewall management, security assessments, and regulatory adherence.
Internal Help Desk and Training: Offering internal support, training, and knowledge base maintenance.
Customer IT Support: Providing external customer IT support, from basic troubleshooting to complex queries.
Application Management: Managing applications, particularly SaaS platforms, with ongoing maintenance, deployment support, and release testing. This model is helpful for systems that require a specialized skill set and are continually adding new features.
The growing value proposition for managed services
It’s growing more challenging to effectively maintain a suite of evolving applications that require specialty skills while supporting day-to-day issues and user requests, tackling growth initiatives, and maintaining operational excellence, without ballooning headcount costs.
Managed services done right has three primary value propositions:
Operational Cost are Lowered: Leveraging an MSP for IT tasks reduces hiring, training, overhead, and the benefits costs required to manage in-house teams. MSPs give you the capability to address changing needs and goals without the baggage of scaling up/down a W2 workforce.
Speed-to-Market is Increased: MSPs bring specialized expertise, accelerating system updates and rollouts. MSPs increase the delivery capability of in-house IT teams and provide an opportunity to upskill your folks on specific applications.
Innovation Increases: By taking care of application administration along with routine tasks, MSPs empower internal teams to direct all their energy toward strategic growth and innovation.
Common Managed Services Models
How you incorporate MSPs in your IT program can be tailored to your business strategies, technologies, and knowledge gaps, below are three common models.
Specialty Services: MSPs are leveraged for the complete rollout of a project or specific service. Generally, this type of model is the best fit for initiatives that have a definitive completion criterion, and maintenance of the buildout is transitioned to a different team once the initiative is complete. Helpful when:
Implementing a new module of an existing application, such as enabling a customer portal offered by your billing solution.
The introduction of a new pricing strategy to your quoting, billing, and accounting systems.
Staff Augmentation: A model where the MSP is an extension of your IT team, and the MSP takes on a specific chunk of ongoing work to support internal teams due to current bandwidth or expertise on a specific system. Leverage to:
Provide helpdesk administration.
Provide process documentation and testing services or deployments for regular feature rollout or system enhancements.
Add experienced support for internal IT projects, such as the onboarding of a new revenue stream to CRM, CPQ, and Billing systems.
Full system management: MSPs manage entire IT systems, from monitoring and security to full tech stack management, ideal for small, fast-growing companies or as a cost-saving measure. Commonly provides:
Full tech stack management from license procurement to system administration and custom development.
Monitoring, ongoing audits, and security services.
When to consider adding Managed Services to your model
All managed services models offer access to technology specific expertise without needing to train or hire full-time staff. When effectively partnered with a focused business strategy, managed services provide an increase in velocity and allows your team to focus on strategic initiatives. But when is the right time to look for a managed services partner?
It’s time to consider the value that a managed services partner can add if your IT program faces:
Increasing costs to administer and enhance critical technology.
Delays to the rollout of strategic initiatives because of the competition for IT team time.
Technology challenges that delay the market release of new products, pricing or customer acquisition and management strategies.
Gap in internal technical knowledge.
Ongoing training needs to support and enhance mission critical technology.
If these challenges resonate, or if you’re curious about managed services, contact us at info@ravusinc.com. Let’s discuss how Ravus can help you grow.
Happy to chat!
Chelsea Fickbohm, Co-Founder
