How To Choose A Managed Services Provider For Your IT

When you are looking to outsource your IT needs, you have a series of serious challenges in front of you. Your business relies on the availability of your IT assets to do business, and some of these applications and services are business critical.

Just ask yourself how long you could do business if you can’t use your email? What happens if someone manages to hack your data and can get at your customer lists and financial information?

Not a pleasant thought is it – but when you outsource your IT to a Managed Services Provider (also known as an MSP), you are giving them considerable responsibility over your business. You have to make the right decisions here, or it will cost you time and money, and quite possibly much more too!

So, what are you looking for in a potential MSP partner?

Staffing
IT is a very broad area and no-one can possibly be experienced and skilled in every area. A generalist may be able to keep your network running, but when something happens out of the ordinary, you’re going to be in trouble. The MSP should be able to offer a team of engineers with different specialties, so you are able to dip into a pool of talent.  More than this, if you are relying on a small team, or even an individual provider, then what happens when they are short-staffed due to workload, vacation or illness? You will still need the coverage a larger team can provide.

Experience and Training
What experience does the MSP have – are there any areas of specialty in a vertical? For instance, assisting healthcare providers maintain compliance with patient information for HIPAA and other federal legislation is exceptionally important, and is not something for the inexperienced MSP to take on.

As IT is a fast-changing market, it is also imperative that the engineers you are being offered are current with certifications and professional development. In this way, you can rely on getting access to the latest technology and techniques to improve your business productivity and security.

Cost
IT is not cheap, but you can save a lot of money not simply by improving efficiencies, but also by reducing your overall IT bill. Outsourcing is an excellent way to achieve this, but you can still end up with an open-ended bill, particularly if something goes wrong with your infrastructure. Look at MSPs who offer a cap on the monthly cost in exchange for taking on the risk of keeping your network humming along.

Location
MSPs tend to operate in the small to medium-sized business range, and as such they are themselves not large companies as a general rule. While many monitoring and updating tools allow for work to be done remotely, there are inevitably times when you need an engineer or team on your premises. The cost and time to deploy them can become excessive unless the MSP is local to your locations.

Range of Services Offered
This ties in with the skills and experience of the team that can be fielded by the MSP, but really reflects how major vendors of hardware and software view the MSP too. Network management, data storage and virtualization, operating their own datacenter (a big plus), ISP experience, security and disaster recovery, Unified Communications (e.g. VoIP), and helpdesk support, are really all mandatory requirements for an MSP to be considered by you.

Jensen Carlyle is a freelance writer and blogger on technology and business issues, and he is currently researchiong the Metro DC MSP market for Swift Systems.

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