IT Managed Service Providers- why employ them?

Like all things in life, we are all good at something. Malcom Gladwell popularised the theory in his book Outliers: The Story of Success, that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to become an expert or to master your subject. This takes a lot of effort and for most of us don’t have the time or inclination to be masters of everything we do.

Outsourcing what we are aren’t good at, or don’t like doing is by far the best method to concentrate on what we are good at.  Business success can be defined by what we don’t want to do, so we can focus on what we really enjoy doing well.

Outsourcing your Information Technology strategy or support is no different from outsourcing your accounting function to a qualified accountant. I am pretty sure if you met one of us at a party, like meeting an accountant (sorry to all the accountants out there), you would glaze over within 30 seconds whilst we bore you rigid as we enthusiastically inform you about the latest IT issues, AI advances, or cyber threats, that’s because we are passionate about what we do and like accountants we specialise in our field or expertise.

As IT professionals, who are trained to support IT systems, we also know a little bit of knowledge is a very dangerous thing when protecting IT systems. Please be very careful with asking the office manager, who has a lot of responsibilities already, to personally fix IT issues. We often have conversations which starts with, ‘but I have anti-virus on the PC’s, isn’t that enough’ after a cyber mishap. Unfortunately, the answer to this much posed question is ‘no’. If someone gains administration rights to the site, they can turn off endpoint security and tamper proofing tools. Office managers are not fully equipped to know how to best protect IT systems because it’s only a small part of their remit, something we do 24/7, across multiple clients. We are constantly experiencing the IT patterns and document fixes as they aren’t normally an isolated incident or cyber threat, something the Office Manager has no visibility of.

We have many thousands of hours over many decades practicing Information Technology, we have the scars to prove it and some of us have gone grey with it.

As an IT Manage Service Provider (MSP) we have specific service level response times within our support agreements depending on the criticality of the reported issue.  However, as your support team we are very cyber conscientious and secure the IT environment to the required standards. We know how to mitigate risk when it comes to supporting and upgrading critical IT infrastructure.

As an example, here are just some of things we do within our support agreement.

• Dedicated Helpdesk support desk with an escalation team.
• Software security patch management, weekly.
• Live Endpoint protection updates, servers, desktops, notebook as well as mobiles and tablets.
• Provide lifecycle management for budgeting, when software is no longer supportable, or hardware replacements are due.
• Configuring protective firewalls and limiting access to only those authorised.
• Preventing Spam entering the IT network, and training clients’ employees on how to spot phishing attempts.
• Checking and backing up critical data daily (several times a day) and proving its recoverability.
• Providing resilient data circuits, networking, and strategic IT advice for business continuity.

We perform these tasks daily so clients do not have to worry or employ a dedicated IT manager, which is costly.

However, the same services apply when clients do have an internal resource because when you reach a particular employee count or scale  an IT Manager’s responsibility is normally dedicated to supporting the critical application that runs the entire business. As an individual they often do not have time to keep the underlying infrastructure healthy or assist employees with their IT issues. An MSP like Integer take away the more mundane tasks so they can concentrate on keeping the business-critical application operational and the business financial wheels spinning. Furthermore, like all of us, IT Managers are people as well and go on holiday, might be off sick or move away so it’s still important to have several services provided by MSP’s regardless of size to support the business. Like IT business continuity the IT Manager could be also the single point of failure if he or she gets hit be the proverbial bus.

If you have any questions or concerns about your IT set up and would like to discuss an IT infrastructure audit, please do not hesitate to contact us.