IT managed services are certain tasks outsourced to a third-party organization so you can devote your time on growing your business. Managed services strive to offer the best IT solutions for your business with a team of IT specialists.

No matter the niche of your business, every business needs IT support for good growth. A few of these organizations are able to build their own IT departments but many businesses do not as it is not possible to hire an entire team of IT experts.

Some businesses are able to hire entry level IT personnel. However, the limited levels of knowledge, skills, and experience makes it hard to solve complex IT issues. This leads to businesses reaching out to IT managed services such as ConvergeSol to manage their IT needs.

For someone who’s researching about hiring managed IT services, we have compiled a few things to help you along the process.

Also read: What Are Managed IT Services?

How To Use IT Managed Services For Your Business?

When businesses are considering managed IT services, most often they’re looking for complete management of their IT system. This means you have no internal employees involved with handling your IT environment. Instead, you’re trusting your MSP with the entirety of your IT environment. 

Like any contracted service, you’ll sign an agreement with your MSP for the services they’ll provide. This document clearly lays out expectations between you and your managed IT services provider (MSP). 

Here are two things you can and should expect from an MSP:

Certified & Skilled IT Experts

MSPs offer many benefits, one of them is to meet your IT needs with the help of a team of certified and trained IT experts. Your MSP IT experts are usually certified & experienced to implement the right solutions in your IT environment.

Typically inhouse IT engineers have at least basic skills that can solve basic issues with your IT environment such as software installation, connectivity issues, or some trivial system troubleshooting. With only these basic skills, the IT personnel is considered a tier 1 engineer.

However, if you require solving a complex problem such as routing protocols, network & security issues, migration to another cloud, etc, you would need level 2 or 3 engineers. Hiring tier 2 or tier 3 IT experts on payroll can be quite expensive over time but luckily, the best MSPs already have them for you.

It will benefit your business in two ways: avoiding to pay hefty salaries of tier 2 or tier 3 engineers & still getting them through MSPs with nominal fees.

Personalized Experience

Although an MSP is a contracted service, renowned companies will offer personalized services. One of the ways to do this is to assign engineers to work with specific clients. This reduces response time, offers better insights as there’s no passing the blame among each other, and provides better customer & technical support to the client.

Other crucial components of personalized experience offered by the best managed service provider like ConvergeSol are prompt response and proactive approach.

Also read: How To Find The Right IT Managed Services Provider For Your Business?

How Do You Know You Really Need IT Managed Services?

Managed IT services help businesses grow and reach their goals effectively. But how will you know if your business really needs these services? Here are some questions you should answer that can help you know:

• Which areas of your business are lacking in productivity?

• Are your customers not satisfied with your current desk services and/or response time?

• Is your disaster recovery team organized or can be organized better?

• Are security breaches, attacks and vulnerabilities becoming huge concerns for your business?

• Is the lack of IT support & troubleshooting affecting the productivity and morale of your employees?

• Is your business experiencing increased downtimes?

If you answer “yes” to even one of these questions, it might be the right time to partner up with the right managed services provider.

Also read: Improve Productivity of your Tech Team with Managed IT Services

Here’s Why You Should Work With An MSP

After you've done the right research, consider whether the MSP you’re deciding on has your company's best interests in mind and shares your corporate culture, processes, and priorities.

While protecting and managing your company's most crucial assets is necessary, this is only part of the IT managed services puzzle. An effective MSP must also ensure a robust workflow that is completed by its skilled IT experts through latest technologies.

For example, when you choose ConvergeSol as your MSP, we take the time to understand, incorporate, and incorporate all of these elements into your company's day-to-day business practices so you can focus on strategic initiatives.

The best MSP will also offer your business from prompt response to quick resolutions to the best solutions through latest technologies. With the right MSPs like ConvergeSol, you will never experience your query being set as “acknowledged but forgotten”.

Also read: How Are IT Managed Services Useful for Businesses?

Getting Started with Managed IT Services

Now that you know what managed services are, how they can help your company, and roughly how much they cost, we come to the interesting part: What it looks like to work under a IT managed services contract. So far we've mostly focused on service, but the provider is just as important. In order for you to understand what you need to do to get started with managed services for your IT, we still have a few things ahead of us.

Qualities to look for when hiring an MSP:

We can all remember times when the provider  made a difference on a service we paid for, and this will likely come to mind when you think about who to go with for managed IT services NYC. Not only do you want your MSP to solve your problems, you want them to be professional and offer the right solutions.

When looking for an MSP, consider factors such as:

The MSP Has A Highly Skilled Technical Workforce

As a company, you will encounter different levels of IT problems. Some will be a simple and straightforward solution that a basic engineer can solve. The biggest headache, however, is the problem that requires the assistance of highly knowledgeable engineers.

MSPs employ engineers who can solve most of your problems without escalating to an engineer. While MSP engineers always have a certain level of skill, everyone who helps you should  have the answer to your problem. Problem.

The best MSPs go one step further and support their engineers with a team of technical leadership. When engineers, managers and executives understand the complexities of IT, there will always be someone ready to step in and help you in an emergency.

The MSP Communicates Clearly With Customers & Uses Proactive Approach

Managing your IT environment requires trust, so MSPs know how to maintain that relationship through clear and frequent communication. You can trust them to know they are seeing and planning your request, even if  they don't receive it right away. This type of communication will help you know what to expect and reassure you that your MSP will take care of your IT needs.

The MSP Pursues Innovation

While the main job of your MSP is to keep your IT environment  running, they can do a lot more. You can work with your MSP to plan which future IT projects you should support in the implementation. This could be the advancement of IoT technology, virtual classroom technology, or anything you think will help your business.

Conclusion

IT entails many complex processes from network & security to data storage to cloud migration, etc. Taking care of all these IT needs can become difficult for the business however, managed IT services can manage them along with your IT infrastructure. This helps you free up your work schedule to better focus on other crucial business tasks.

And if you’re looking for the best Managed IT services NYC, with a team of highly skilled & experienced IT experts to take care of your IT environment, you can get in touch with ConvergeSol.