Getting your technology to run optimally can make a huge, positive impact on your ROI. That goes without saying; it’s why so many businesses turned to (and continue to turn to) managed services providers. But what about the IT managed services challenges?
There are, in fact, IT managed services provider challenges that, if not addressed, can reduce the overall value you’ll gain from these services.
The best way to circumvent these challenges and find the appropriate managed services providers (MSPs) for your business is to identify them. To that end, let’s take a look at the most common IT managed services challenges.
Five Common IT Managed Services Challenges
There are five common IT managed services providers challenges that can impair your business’s potential ROI – they are:
- Lack of qualified domain experts
- Poor response times
- Insufficient early assessment
- Inability to develop an IT roadmap
- Unclear invoicing
Now that’s not to say that these are the only IT managed services provider challenges. But this list does represent some of the most common IT troubles you’re likely to encounter.
Lack of Qualified Domain Experts
If you’re working with MSPs and you want them to manage your entire IT stack, that means you need to leverage support from experts across a wide range of domains; it’s no simple thing to manage a business’s entire technology environment, after all.
You’ll potentially need:
- Networking experts
- Cloud experts
- Cybersecurity experts
- vCIOs
- Data storage experts
- Digital transformation experts
- VoIP experts
- Cabling experts
Having all these experts on a single team can be a tall task for some managed service providers.
This is especially apparent when you take on more complex IT projects like data migration, digital transformations, server setups, total network overhauls, penetration testing, etc.
If your team doesn’t have the requisite expertise, in other words, these projects may not yield maximal benefits or, worse yet, may fail outright.
And the truth is that there are many MSPs out there that are able to provide some of the above services, but not many can solve all your IT troubles competently.
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If you want to ensure that you avoid this IT managed services challenge, the key is to perform an in-depth evaluation of your potential managed service provider.
If your assessment reveals that they are indeed able to handle the above tasks (you may even choose to point them back to this blog as a reference) and guarantee results with service level agreements, then you can rest easy knowing you’re in good hands.
Poor Response Times
Many businesses are beset each year by increasingly sophisticated and frequent online attacks; these attacks are set to yield over $10.5 trillion in value by 2025.
Similarly, network downtime can lead to massive losses of thousands of dollars a minute.
With the stakes this high, how can you protect your business?
Your business’s safety requires a two-pronged approach: reactive and proactive protections.
On the reactive side of things, you’ll need IT support experts available 24/7/365 to respond to these dire issues. Otherwise, they have the chance to fester into truly unmanageable drains on your business’s productivity and revenue.
Source: Freepik
One of the best ways to guarantee that these security issues and other IT troubles don’t interfere with your business’s bottom line is to have access to rapid support, again backed by SLAs to ensure that you can trust lofty promises.
With even a few minutes of downtime, as mentioned above, meaning thousands of dollars, and with a small oversight in your cybersecurity paving the way for a potentially massive breach, your business needs to be able to access IT support at all times.
Insufficient Early Assessment
A doctor cannot cure your ailments without first making a proper diagnosis; your IT partner can’t solve your IT issues without first identifying them.
As your business continues to grow and develop, it’s only natural that it will face new technology challenges (relating to scale, increased work demand, more disparate workforce, etc.).
But your MSP must be able to identify all these issues – both the ones you’re currently facing (and may not even realize you’re facing) as well future troubles – early on in your relationship.
With a proper understanding of your business, industry, and needs, your MSP will then be able to implement the most optimal solutions. Better yet, a deep understanding of your workflow will also enable them to identify redundancies and other possibilities for automation/acceleration, yielding more productivity.
Many IT companies tend to skip or half-perform this step, making it a major and all-too-common IT managed services provider challenge.
Before signing on with an MSP, in other words, don’t be sold on rapid implementation alone – be sure that they are capable and willing to perform an in-depth audit of all your IT needs. This is also part of the ‘proactive’ step mentioned in the section above and is a great way to improve IT support ROI.
Inability to Develop an IT Roadmap
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If you’re turning to MSPs for help, that means you’re facing IT issues currently, yes. But that doesn’t mean these will be the sole IT issues your business faces.
Quite the contrary, as you grow, you can expect to face increasingly complex challenges.
Reliable partners will help you sidestep and avoid many of these potential roadblocks, however, by developing and implementing an in-depth IT roadmap.
This roadmap will benefit your business in a variety of ways, not the least of which is that it will proactively address future technology constraints that can otherwise impair growth and cost time, money, and resources.
Customer support and communication is key here, as your IT partner needs to evaluate your goals and forecast potential issues associated with said goals. From there, they need to develop ways to circumvent those issues.
This can be as simple as building out technology lifecycle schedules to more complicated projects like implementing a digital transformation to access the cloud and ensure maximal scalability. Going along with the doctor analogy of earlier, but this is very much an example of the ‘an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure’ idiom.
Unclear Invoicing
It’s easy to get lost in technical jargon, acronyms, abbreviations, foreign-sounding technological offerings, etc. After all, you’re probably not a tech guru, nor should you have to be to understand what your MSP is accomplishing.
Transparency is a must, both in planning and implementing solutions as well as when you receive your bill at the end of the month.
Your eyes shouldn’t glaze over as they’re assailed by a bevy of terms you’ve never seen nor heard of before. Instead, your MSP should take the time to explain where your money is going. More than that, they should be able to put in plain English all types of IT services they’ve provided and how they’re helping your business grow.
Avoid the Common IT Managed Services Provider Challenges With Fencecore
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The challenge and benefits of managed IT services should be clear now; the next step is finding the right MSP to support your business.
And you won’t find any better than Fencecore. Our team will work tirelessly to ensure that your IT is fully optimized, secure, and will never constrain business growth.
Reach out today for a free consultation.
Featured Photo Credit Freepik