In times of turmoil and unpredictability, such as we are all in today, many businesses hunker down and would just rather save their money than consider the value of an MSP. They are not necessarily considering the risk of loosing critical data that keeps their business running, viable and profitable. Many businesses do not consider the cost of downtime. Some surveys have the hourly cost of downtime for computer networks estimated at 42,000, some at $5600 per minute (Gartner). To be honest, it’s not simple to calculate, and but it is significant and the larger the business, the larger the impact.
Consider the fact that the majority of businesses that lose their information (their data) shut their doors permanently within a couple years. Security breaches erode client trust as you must disclose the loss of client data.
It isn’t easy to justify budgets when things are tight, especially when many businesses are trying to keep their costs low in a pandemic.
Here are some benefits to consider:
- Cost Centers – some MSP’s that are fully integrated into regular IT meetings and business planning can also review technology and communication operations, and expenditures. The goal is to put forth plans for improving efficiencies, modernization and expenditure reduction. Often equipment and wiring can be completely replaced by modernizing and optimizing services can improve service delivery, availability and improve uptime.
- Downtime Prevention – proactive maintenance has proven to reduce downtime. In some MSP’s they measure (KPI) downtime as a KPI as they understand the true cost of even a workstation to be offline for a day or a few hours. The lost time and productivity of that employee usually isn’t isolated to that employee, but can trickle down to other teams and client deliverables. The businesses’ clients could be impacted and the costs far reaching.
- Budget Stability – especially compared to a break-fix environment where there is unexpected and unplanned downtime due to hardware failures, these are budget hits that are not usually planned for and can be hard hitting. Being charged the same amount per month to keep the network running proactively is predictable.
- Business Continuity – when asked, many businesses still don’t have a working backup to help protect against data loss. A reliable backup that is tested regularly provides assurance that in the event of a security breach, ransomware attack or unexpected failure, the business has a way to recover. This reduces the risk of business closure or significant impact due to data loss.
MSP Super Power
Your MSP team and Information Technologists are not solely there to jump and react to outages and service requests, but rather be part of the business team and performing critical functions that keep the business running smoothly. Critical functions such as backup testing cannot be ignored.
Your MSP teams are continually honing their skills and keeping their knowledge current as they apply best of breed solutions across multiple clients. A single person is no longer responsible for any specific situation.
Aside from never taking a vacation, being agile and typically having a broad set of skills, your MSP can definitely help with cost savings, downtime prevention and ensuring your business continuity needs on a stable and predictable budget.
The ultimate goal would be to have an affordable, fully redundant, centrally managed and secure, disaster proof IT infrastructure where you no longer have to worry about any of it and can focus on being successful in your business.
Why not get in touch with us, we would be ecstatic to help another business elevate their success. This is what motivates us and would make our day!