If your company has recently grown — or
has added new hardware or software —
and your information technology department is working its fingers to the bone trying to keep up with the demand for help
from end users, it may be time to consider
an MSP, or managed IT service provider.
“With the shortage of qualified IT professionals in the marketplace at the moment
and the increased technology demands
from compliance issues, IT departments
are finding themselves stretched thin,” says
Gary Matsuda, co-founder and executive
vice president of Agile360, a technology
consulting and engineering firm based in
Irvine, California. “Companies that find
themselves in this position ought to consider outsourcing IT functions by using an
MSP.”
Smart Business spoke with Matsuda
about MSP and how it can help companies
take control of their IT departments without losing control of their information.
What can an MSP do for an IT department?
MSPs offer a variety of core infrastructure services that generally fall into one of
two categories: reactive services or proactive services.
The large majority of MSPs provide help
in the reactive category. This could include
hardware and software monitoring and
troubleshooting, application support and
tuning, and general help desk duties, such
as password resets, printing issues, etc.
In the ‘proactive’ category, MSPs can provide consulting on larger issues, such as
patch management — installing security
measures and basic upkeep of the operating system and application software. An
MSP can also provide help in strategic IT
planning through quarterly business
reviews with the business or application
owners. In these review sessions, the previous quarter’s issues are summarized and
topics revolving around performance and
efficiency are discussed.
In addition, some MSPs provide co-location services, including fully redundant
data center infrastructures with managed
physical or virtual servers on a monthly
rental basis. These co-location servers can
be located in different geographical
regions and, with data replication technologies, can provide a key component of
a company’s business continuity solution
in case of a disaster or system malfunction.
When should an IT executive or business
owner consider an MSP as an alternative to
hiring more IT staff?
An MSP solution works very well for
many small- to medium-sized businesses
that are finding it hard to keep their IT staff
lean and efficient. When a business grows
and adds employees, it usually requires
more IT staff to support these end users.
By hiring an MSP to handle the core IT
services, the business does not have to
keep adding IT staff and deal with all the
training and retention problems that go
along with it.
Contracting an MSP could be a sensitive
issue within the IT department and needs
to be positioned in the right way. Your IT
staffers need to realize that they are not
being displaced, but that the MSP will help
offset the added workload and allow them
to focus on more strategic IT initiatives.
Could hiring an MSP save money?
Yes, and the cost savings can be significant when you consider that the average
salary for qualified IT professionals in
Southern California can range from
$60,000 to $100,000-plus a year. Many MSPs
offer ‘block support’ contracts, which are
prepaid hours of support. These also come
in different levels — from advanced senior
level IT support for complex issues to more basic remote administration duties,
such as the ‘help desk’. The prices per hour
or per block will vary accordingly. That
said, if a company’s IT environment is
chaotic, it may require some prerequisite
costs to stabilize the environment in preparation for a hand off to the MSP. But assuming that the IT situation is under control,
the savings can be significant.
Are there security risks associated with hiring an MSP for co-location services?
Depending on the level of management
and administration delegated to the MSP,
security risks are not too different than if a
company were to move its services to a co-location facility on its own. That said, you
do need to trust that the provider has a
good hiring process with background and
other checks and qualified personnel.
There is a lot of concern today regarding disaster recovery, particularly because of more
stringent compliancy issues. How can MSPs
help companies with disaster recovery?
Any good disaster recovery or business
continuity solution will have a second data
center in a different geographical location,
but having a second site is usually cost-prohibitive for many small- to medium-size
businesses. It is very expensive for a business to have its own computing resources
in a different location on a standby basis,
which requires a huge capital investment in
rack space, network, servers, operating
systems, power, cooling, etc. MSPs can
eliminate the capital outlay required to support a secondary data center by providing
managed servers on a rental basis, moving
the expenses to the operating budget. As
an added benefit, with the proper data
replication and management tools in place,
the second site can also be used as a development/test environment.
Using an MSP’s co-location services is an
excellent alternative to fulfilling a disaster
recovery plan. Disaster recovery is a hot
topic now because of the compliance-related tasks a business needs to fulfill in order
to adhere to its documented business continuity plans.
GARY MATSUDA is the co-founder and executive vice president
of Agile360, www.agile360.com, a technology consulting and
engineering firm based in Irvine, California. Reach Matsuda at
(949) 253-4106 or [email protected].