Managed Services: Helping Companies Make The Right Choice

By Ilker Simsir, Product Manager, Comodo

The IT services industry continues to see a shift from the reactive break-fix model to the proactive managed services provider (MSP) approach. And for good reason; while businesses might feel secure with their current break-fix “solution,” they largely lack the knowledgebase required to foresee the ease of doing business with MSPs. 

For small to medium business owners, the mere thought of transitioning to a managed services plan may be an imposing one. However, it’s the responsibility of an MSP to help business owners understand the core benefits of making the switch. Here are four points to emphasize the benefits:

1. MSP Beats Break-Fix: Full Managed Services Versus A Break Fix Model. MSPs should look to illustrate for business owners the core ways in which MSPs provide solutions superior to the break-fix model. Explain how MSPs prevent problems, while break-fix solutions profit from those same problems. Break-fix is reactive, so if you have an incident, there is no one to prevent it from happening in the first place. Additionally, each incident would take a longer resolution time compared to an MSP model, and would require manual triggers to detect the incidents. Break-fix may appear to work well in the short term, but break-fix isn’t scalable in the long term.
2. In-House IT Might Not Be The Solution. Small and medium business owners may be dreaming of the day when they can hire their own dedicated team of in-house IT professionals. It’s logical until they understand that a single IT professional is likely to cost more than $70,000 per year. And this would be typically for a specific skill set. No IT professional can know all things. And that’s just one professional. An MSP can provide that small business, full-time IT coverage, without the many costs that quickly pile up when assembling an in-house IT team. Also, an IT team can quickly lose the coverage that an MSP has (which is constant) by spending an inordinate amount of time extinguishing the common fires that arise during day-to-day business operations.
3. Better Budgeting With An MSP. Technology planning as a fiscal concept is difficult to say the least — the scope of what can change or crash at any time is simply profound. Computers and servers crash, malware attacks happen, data breaches occur.  For those who aren’t swayed by worst-case scenarios, most will agree how technology is wonderful — until it isn’t. The break-fix model simply waits for these events, and when they do occur, solving the problem becomes far more important than saving money. Not only does the fixed rate of MSPs allow businesses to better budget for technology, a proactive maintenance model often prevents these events from occurring through round-the-clock monitoring.  
4. MSP Secure. While security may not be top priority for small business owners, it should be. MSPs can help companies envision the devastation they’d experience as a result of a cyberattack. Many businesses feel protected by all-in-one antivirus solutions, but of course the security they feel isn’t secure in reality. The threat, though, is real: smaller companies are growing more and more attractive to cybercriminals specifically because they tend to have weaker online security. Conveying the importance of patch management, firewall monitoring, and antivirus technologies delivered through an MSP model can be effective.   

MSPs can be the solution for small to mid-sized enterprises with the right tools and solutions in place.  What are they? 

• As an MSP, do you have a remote management and monitoring solution, so you automate routine tasks, monitor and manage multiple endpoints from one central console and proactively service your customers?
• As an MSP, do you have service desk capabilities to provide professional service automation to manage customer service requests, service level agreements and ticket priorities?  
• As an MSP, do you have patch management capabilities to maintain up to date knowledge of all available patches from operating systems to third party software?

MSPs can be the solution for small to mid-sized enterprises with the right tools and solutions in place.  It’s far more important to clearly position the benefits of the managed services: better monitoring, budgeting, and security. Your prospective clients will be far more inclined to agree, and they will be happy to finally leave behind the old break-fix approach.

Ilker Simsir is a product manager at Comodo, an innovator and developer of cybersecurity solutions. You can contact Ilker at ilker.simsir@comodo.com.