In this video, our CEO and Founder, Chris, talks about whether a Managed Service Provider can replace internal IT Support, as well as several ways your existing team could work with an MSP to help expand their team? If you’re interested in learning more about what a Managed Service Provider can do for your business, visit our Managed IT Services page.
Transcript of Managed Service Providers replace an internal IT Support Service Video:
Can Managed Service providers replace an internal IT support service? So you’re presently looking at perhaps an engineer that’s internal, performing support for all of your users. The issues that you might get with that is when they’re on holiday, or they’re sick and the users have issues they’ve got no one to call. You also want to know that you’re getting the right technology advice from an internal IT person. There’s only so much one IT person can know, so this person might actually be fantastic, have worked in the organisation for a long time, and they might also think ‘Perhaps now is the time for me to move on’. So that leaves you with a bit of a quandary.
The Managed Service Provider:
Let’s look at the IT support service first. Well, all of your users would be able to call up the Managed Service Provider helpdesk, there would be a team of engineers allocated to you. They’d get to know your site, they’d have a knowledge base in their support system of what’s been going on, what the history is – so it’s really nice, there’s a bit of continuity when you call up that helpdesk. That helpdesk actually would then log calls in a web-based support system and they’d operate on a 24/7 basis, so you’ve got an immediate improvement on the duration of service that’s provided, and you’re getting service levels.
The next thing to consider is, will they perform desk-side assistance for your users? Well of course, 98% of all fixes are done remotely now, but engineers at the Managed Service Provider could be dispatched to perform a callout to your customer site, and sit there with the user and fix things in situ. Or install new laptops and new PCs. A typical service level that comes with that is they’re on site within 24 hours. For anything that’s critical, they’ll be there within 4 hours.
So that service is already performing a little bit of an extension on the internal team. They can also provide you the right technical recommendations on any new technology and that will really be fitted around the size of organisation that you are. So if you’re 20-users, you’ll get different tech advice to when you’re a 100-user organisation. So, all of that should be done for a fixed monthly fee by the Managed Service Provider, so Finance Directors love it, they can budget it, and it generally works out cheaper or more cost-effective than having an internal team.
The other option is you can go for a hybrid scenario, where you have the internal team, but because they’re maxed out you don’t want to get a second or third engineer – you actually want to outsource a fraction of the support service to that Managed Service Provider. That might be first line fixes, which accounts for about 40 to 50% of your support cases, so that’s going to save you a bit of money. You also might want to outsource just third line queries – specialist, heavyweight queries that the internal IT team can bounce out to the Managed Service Provider. That hybrid scenario works quite well in slightly larger accounts.
So can a Managed Service provider, be used for outsourced IT Support? Absolutely. It can really help you in a time of need, and help you as you’re a growing, or even scaling down type of organisation. It will fit the pocket in the right way, and the budget.
