When you invest in any service, making sure you get the most from it is vital – but how? We take a look at what you should expect from your managed service provider.
Through economies of scale and shared resources, a managed service provider can help you realise measurable return on investment (ROI). But some returns on your investment may be harder to quantify.
In your current state, it’s relatively straightforward to compare in-house costs – like people and equipment – with the costs of outsourcing.
But if you’re on a journey of technology transformation, then predicting your desired future state’s operating costs can be trickier. And the picture becomes more complicated when, based on this ideal, you try to determine the ROI of partnering with a managed service provider.
Rely on your managed service provider
Thankfully, through their work with hundreds of organisations, managed service providers have considerable experience in identifying savings.
Examples of this could be via Azure Reserved Instances, SaaS applications and even application modernisation. So, you can offset these savings against what you pay for their services.
Here, we explore the ROI you could realise by working with a managed service provider, including the less tangible benefits.
Leverage the benefits of a partnership
By enlisting a managed service provider’s support, you can liberate your people to concentrate on where they excel. For example, you can give them more time to focus on research and development or modernising your applications.
But merely outsourcing services traditionally delivered in-house is to miss a potential opportunity. By engaging with a managed service provider for strategic guidance, you can accelerate change in your business through cloud support services or by modernising your workplace.
Choosing a provider with a broad portfolio of services gives you more choices for the future. As well as helping you leverage your existing tech, they can introduce you to emerging solutions and services that may not be on your radar.
And whether your appetite is for a big bang approach, or continuous, incremental change, an MSP can help you with your business case and demonstrate the potential ROI in black and white.
The value of cyber security
Cyber security is one of the areas where ROI may seem less tangible to you as a business. Your provider may thwart a cyber attack, which, had it been successful, could have cost your organisation tens of thousands of pounds or more.
This figure will never appear on your accounts, but your stakeholders will benefit from levels of assurance they may not have had before.
With cyber criminal’s tactics evolving daily, businesses are now switched on to the need for robust cyber security services and in turn, getting the best value from these. According to government statistics:
- Almost half of businesses (46%) and a quarter of charities (26%) reported cyber security breaches or attacks in 2020
- Of these 46% of businesses, 32% experienced these issues at least once a week in 2020, compared to 22% in 2017
- 39% of businesses affected reported negative impacts, including needing more resource to manage breaches, their people being unable to carry out their work and repair or recovery costs
Engaging services such as a managed service provider’s Cyber Security Operations Centre (CSOC) will enable your business to implement bleeding-edge security.
A CSOC keeps pace with the rapidly evolving threat landscape, deploys the latest technologies and recruits highly qualified professionals.
Effectively, you’re sharing the cost with the other organisations the CSOC is protecting and defending. Were you to replicate these resources in-house for your exclusive use, your spend would be significantly higher.
And the CSOC’s team will apply lessons learned from other clients’ experiences to your business, extending the advantages beyond a price point.
Savings through scalability
One often-overlooked cost-benefit of engaging a managed service provider is the potential to scale up or down to reflect your circumstances and market conditions.
The service you receive can be adjusted to remain aligned with your organisation’s needs, so, much like utility bills, you pay only for what you need. This scalability is especially attractive for organisations working with OpEx over CapEx models.
Tapping into valuable knowledge
Partnering with a managed services provider enables you to access a variety of subject matter experts. They live and breathe their fields of expertise, have tried and tested blueprints for success, and can apply the lessons learned from countless other client engagements.
Consequently, a managed service provider can save you a considerable amount of time researching your options, accelerating your time to value. And they will respectfully steer you away from potentially inappropriate investments, ensuring you avoid costly mistakes.
And your managed service provider keeps on top of industry trends, helping you to stay ahead of the competition.
Upskilling your people
Your in-house IT team understands what’s under the bonnet of your business better than anyone. A managed service provider will seek to leverage their knowledge and work with them to identify and fill the gaps. It’s a collaborative approach, with all parties sharing the same objective – the effective, timely delivery of your goals.
Quality managed service providers relish the opportunity to upskill in-house personnel and will integrate with your team. Ultimately, the right managed service provider will leave your professionals on a healthier and more robust footing than when they found them.
More uptime equals less remediation spend
IT failures, internet downtime, power outages, systems locked by cyber criminals – all are potentially crippling for organisations. And the adage ‘time means money’ is never truer, as costs increase the longer a problem persists.
A highly reactive break/fix approach is not a financially viable option for our always-on era, with customers, employees and stakeholders less likely to tolerate a loss of service. By proactively monitoring your systems, a managed service provider should be one step ahead of the issues that threaten your uptime.
They also offer strategic guidance and support, working with your senior leadership team to review your technology estate and, where appropriate, recommend more reliable and robust solutions.
Project delivery
In the world of business, a surprising number of projects don’t meet their objectives or end as originally planned. In our experience, the primary reasons for IT project failure are:
- Not engaging end users or supporting and training them sufficiently
- Not integrating and managing service providers
- Not appointing sufficient external expertise
- Inadequate governance
- Poor delivery management
By enlisting the strategic, technical and change and adoption expertise of a managed service provider, you can avoid the classic pitfalls of project execution and the problems encountered by your competitors.
To discover more about how partnering with a managed service provider can deliver value for your business, visit our dedicated page to get in touch.
