Managed IT Services: MSP for Coeur d’Alene, Post Falls, & Spokane

1.) Predictable costs that scale with your growth: The services of a Managed IT Services Provider are set up to aid businesses by curtailing overhead costs. Fixed costs that are known upfront and scale with a business’s growth are a key driver of this – meaning they adjust with business needs. Managed IT Services add security to your business and take away the frustration of internal administration, freeing you up for more important tasks.

Managed IT service providers offer efficient IT support by giving you a team of professionals focused on IT service management and operations. They handle all these needs at a predictable monthly cost – all while helping to eliminate huge, unexpected expenses.

2.) Avoiding the sunk cost fallacy: Costs incurred at the time of purchase that cannot be recovered are sunk costs. Operational expenses are incurred in the normal course of business and can often be reduced or controlled.

Many small and medium businesses face the prospect of handling their tech support in-house, which means absorbing both operational and sunk costs. However, when you work with a managed tech support provider that can take on these tasks for you, both types of costs can be minimized or avoided.

3.) Professional knowledge with real-world applications: Managed IT Services Providers (MSPs) are the ideal choice for small to medium businesses because they deliver expert support from specialized staff while eliminating the need to hire internal IT employees. These services handle all your tech needs while simultaneously enhancing security and efficiency.

4.) Cybersecurity protection: Managed IT Services Providers manage the cybersecurity needs of businesses in several ways. MSPs layer products, services, and methods to secure your network, servers, computers, and data from ransomware, viruses, malware, and more. Patch management, Business Continuity/Disaster Recovery (BCDR), and offsite backups are also key elements.

Some of the additional security benefits of using an MSP include:

a.) Employee cybersecurity awareness training. Tools that provide your business with the means to help staff identify, recognize, and report cyber threats. These usually include trackable modules with certificates as employees complete the training.

b.) Best practices identification and implementation. Many protections are already available with the products and services you own. MSPs help you identify and implement industry best practices for cybersecurity.

5.) Faster response times: Response and resolution times are a critical key performance indicator for any MSP. A Managed IT Services provider can both receive and resolve issues much quicker due to their specific knowledge of IT issues—meaning less time troubleshooting and more time resolving problems to get your business back online.

To maintain the highest possible IT infrastructure uptime, many businesses already retain MSPs to monitor, maintain, and respond quickly. Most MSPs also provide real-time tracking of issue resolution through trouble ticketing systems with client portals. In short, an MSP helps ensure your technology operates at peak efficiency with minimal downtime.

6.) Monitoring and problem-solving on a proactive basis: Proactive monitoring of systems, networks, and internet services is another major advantage of using an MSP. These insights ensure that your infrastructure, servers, services, and data are always being watched for changes, outages, or performance issues.

When was the last time you checked your server, operating systems, or network firmware? How bad would it be if there was an issue you weren’t aware of?

Like many other small business owners or managers, the answer is likely rarely to never. Proactive monitoring and issue resolution with a results-oriented approach is just one more advantage of using a Managed IT provider. MSPs track information, backups, computers, servers, applications, and devices every minute of every day. This allows them to identify and resolve potential issues before they become costly problems—saving you money, time, and resources.

7.) Reduce potential business threats: Another benefit of using an MSP is the reduction of risk. As a business owner or manager, you must focus on day-to-day operations without the added stress of resolving IT problems like internet outages, malfunctioning computers, or server issues. A Managed IT Services provider gives you peace of mind, knowing your critical information and systems are protected from cyberthreats, hackers, and inevitable hardware or service failures.

In Summary: Regardless of your business size, a Managed IT Services provider gives you confidence that your technology infrastructure is being maintained, monitored, and protected by industry professionals who can handle any issue or emergency quickly and effectively.

This leaves you free to focus on your business while tech support pros deal with the details of your network, computers, Wi-Fi, applications, email, printers, and other technology. A Managed IT Services provider will take care of all your IT needs and provide enterprise-level security at a cost far lower than managing it on your own.

A Managed IT Services Provider (MSP for short) assist businesses in proactively monitoring, managing, and maintaining their technology. This is accomplished without the expense of hiring an in-house IT person or team.

Leveraging the services of an MSP means having a staff of multiple experts with experience in many facets of technology, networking, cybersecurity and more. Through the use of their technology “stack” they can automate monitoring and maintenance while having access to detailed reporting that allows issues to be identified before they become critical.

Even bigger companies with internal IT employees retain the services of an MSP. Especially in cases of major technology implementations, projects, cloud migrations, or infrastructure needs.

Five direct benefits to business Managed IT Services provide:

1.) On demand access to IT professionals: It’s a story as old as time. An employee such as your receptionist or someone else who “knows computers” ends up as your de facto IT team. This almost always ends badly, and the employee can quickly find themselves way outside their element when something serious happens. With a managed service provider, you have a team of experts with a variety of both general and specific information technology expertise. This leaves you and your employees able to focus on their job duties without the worry of also being an IT person.

2.) Rapid problem solving: You need to be up and running during business hours, so downtime is a no-no. An MSP leverages their knowledge and experience to quickly diagnose and resolve issues to keep you working when you need to be. In many cases you also avoid the delay of on-site service call by the MSP leveraging their remote tools and systems to quickly access your infrastructure.

3.) Cost efficiency: A Break/Fix philosophy for a business can result in surprisingly large and unexpected IT costs. Using an MSP allows businesses to have a more constant, predictable IT budget along with set asides for unexpected IT hardware needs.

MSP services for the small business space functions by being more proactive than reactive and allowing you to address IT problems before they happen. This protects you against costly security incidents, extends the life of computer and server hardware, and keeps your tech support needs handled for one constant cost.

The alternative can mean that you are paying emergency rates each time you have a critical IT need, and a single major incident can dwarf annual cost of a managed IT support agreement in some cases.

4.) Not as many issues: Much of what an MSP does on a daily basis helps to keep things from becoming an issue in the first place. Break/Fix, on the other hand, is the process of dealing with IT issues AFTER they happen with little to no proactive work being done on your IT systems. The Break/Fix approach means that you are left at the mercy of an IT firms’ availability all the while leaving you unable to work or work as effectively. All that downtime can add up quickly.

The main objective of an MSP is to keep problems from ever impacting your productivity by way of proactive monitoring and effective security processes.

An MSP will also ensure that your systems and software are up-to-date and current on patches and security updates so that you are always current. This also helps ensure that security risks are minimized.

5.) Business partnership: Your IT needs will inevitably grow along with your business, a solid MSP knows this and can help predict, plan, and execute IT strategies to ensure that you are never behind the curve with your technology and security. An MSP isn’t just about the tactical aspects of IT in preventing and responding to issues, they also work with you on the strategic aspects of information technology including planning, budgeting, and consulting as needed. A good Managed Service provider is always keeping you up to date on best practices, technology to help your business grow, and the most up-to-date security processes and training to protect your business and its critical data.

While this varies depending on your level of engagement with an MSP, they can be an integral part of your growth.

Now that you have a better understanding of Managed IT Services, let’s take a more detailed look at how it can help your business alleviating the fears of managing IT.

New tech opens so many doors for you and your business, but with those open doors come new issues and vulnerabilities. While all this technology has made us more effective and efficient than ever before, it’s also opened us up to new and imaginative ways of exposing our business and its data to cyber threats, hackers, and vulnerabilities.

Open up just about any news website, Facebook page, or Twitter feed and you’ll be sure to see a new attack on businesses small and large just about every day. These hacks affect people locally and globally on a daily basis and even the largest of businesses have a hard time keeping up with the aftermath that comes with these attacks. The top priority of any MSP should be cybersecurity and ensuring that proper processes and practices are being used and implemented in your business to keep you from becoming another preventable statistic.

IT Problems Your Managed IT Services Provider Can Solve: Having an MSP is vastly different than just having a break/fix relationship with your local computer repair shop. A Managed IT Service Provider isn’t there with a single-minded focus to address one (or a few) issue, and then leave with no responsibilities after the fact. The MSP is much like an internal IT group. They are there to help lead you through your growth and the inevitable changes in technology, cloud, telecom, and more.

Increase the reliability of your technology: Internet issues, buggy computers, and unstable applications can take you from calm to frustrated in a hurry. Having a bunch of unmanaged technology that your business has just acquired as needed can manifest itself as these frustrations. A Managed IT Services Provider can identify these deficiencies, implement changes to existing tech, or get your business on the right track with new infrastructure that was designed with stability and reliability in mind.

Internet and network issues are commonplace in the small business space. Oftentimes, a small business owner doesn’t know the impact of putting consumer-grade routers and hardware in a business environment. In addition to the stability impacts, consumer gear just wasn’t designed with cybersecurity in mind.

A good MSP can cut to the core of these issues in a hurry and get businesses with even the smallest hardware budgets to a place of reliability, speed, and stability.

Controlling the cost of IT: Businesses are different in the ways they adopt and consume technology. This means that cookie cutter, one-size-fits-all strategies for IT just won’t cut it. A Managed IT Support Provider looks at your individual needs with an eye for detail and balances the need for technology and security against capital and operational expenses to ensure you have the right mix of technology and IT budget to meet your objectives. A good MSP will also let you know when you need to make an investment in order to stay secure or prevent future issues.

In many cases, a small business has been using break/fix services for so long that they get deep into the one-time solutions that their provider offers to solve immediate problems without looking into the future. In some cases, a business pays more for break/fix services than what the cost of a managed IT service agreement would be. These break/fix arrangements can also be very erratic, with some months having almost no costs, and others that can be thousands to tens of thousands in the event of an emergency.

Pointing out beneficial technology adoptions, such as migration of premise-based servers or telecom services to the cloud, is another way that an MSP adds value.

Constant vigilance: With careful monitoring and tools to determine the “normal” behavior of your network, hardware, and data, an MSP is able to understand what is normal for your business and when to be on alert for issues.

An MSP utilizes a variety of tools to keep a watchful eye on your business 24/7. This plethora of data helps the MSP to stay ahead of issues before they occur, and either take actions to prevent issues or make recommendations as hardware begins to approach the end of its useful life.

This kind of watchful, predictive maintenance both extends the life of your infrastructure and allows for better timing of major technology investments.

And if you needed more reasons to use a Managed IT Services Provider:

1.) Downtime is EXPENSIVE: You come into the office with your morning coffee, just like any other day. You are met at the door by frantic employees all complaining that they cannot access the database that drives your entire operation. You get to your computer thinking it’s just an isolated incident, but then you see it… The “failed to connect” error. The employee who isn’t IT but knows enough to keep things going is out on vacation and in a place with no cell coverage. It’s just you.

With no IT department or MSP to call, you start frantically calling local IT and computer repair shops, but they are all booked out for days or weeks. You have no time to spare, so you agree to an emergency service rate with a highly rated, local IT company. They don’t know your systems and a significant amount of time is spent getting to know your infrastructure, trying to gather IP addresses and passwords, and more. After hours of emergency troubleshooting, it’s determined to be a hardware failure due to multiple failed hard drives in a RAID array that an MSP would have been alerted to months or even years ago. With only the backups you’ve been taking on a flash drive to recover from, the local IT company is doing its best to get you rebuilt from scratch, but it takes time. Time that is all being billed at hundreds of dollars per hour or more, plus an unexpected hardware purchase.

Probably not the day you thought you’d be having.

2.) Break/Fix is a dying model: If the above example wasn’t enough to demonstrate this, consider that in a break/fix relationship your IT/computer repair company isn’t maintaining passwords, monitoring your systems to keep disasters from happening, or doing anything in terms of ongoing cybersecurity. In the data-driven world we live in, it’s just not enough to only fix one-off issues.

The financial and mental burdens of only having someone “on-call” to work on IT issues are too high for all but the smallest “one-person shops.”

Using the best Managed IT Service Provider for your business means that your network, data, and infrastructure are being monitored by industry professionals who ensure that possible points of failure are addressed before they become production-impacting issues.

To recap the benefits of using a managed IT tech support provider: Businesses of all sizes can leverage the power of Managed IT Services. Not having an on-staff IT team doesn’t mean that you have to sacrifice security, stability, and access to industry expertise. Reducing overall costs versus hiring an internal IT team and equipping them to handle IT management is another key benefit of an MSP, as are the predictable costs.

Some of the basic services an MSP provides include:

Patch management: Operating systems and applications need near-daily updates and upgrades for security and stability. Patch management ensures that you are always up to date.

Remote Tech Support: Instant access to the affected computer(s) to assist without needing to be at your location.

Managed AV/EDR: Endpoint security that you never have to remember to update and secures you based on your users’ behavior.

Application and Hardware monitoring: Systems and data are monitored to identify potential failures before they happen.

Give us a shout at 208-635-4400 to talk more about how Managed IT Services can benefit and secure your business.