What Are Managed IT Services and What Are Their Benefits?

by ComputersMadeEasy | Mar 27, 2023

Technology drives your business forward. It drives every modern business forward. But the more reliant your business is on technology, the more vulnerable it is to severe losses in productivity and revenue should that technology fail. What are managed IT services? They are a collection of solutions and services that ensure you don’t face those expensive technology disruptions. 

Understanding the Managed IT Services Definition

To put a finer point on it; in just a handful of minutes of network downtime, your business could lose thousands of dollars in productivity. A single data breach can lead to massive losses–or even force your business to close. If your business can’t effectively leverage the cloud, that could lead to a competitive disadvantage compared to competitors.

Managed IT services are the solutions to these problems listed above. Your IT partner, known as a managed services provider or MSP, will work to implement fixes across your entire IT stack protecting your business from IT threats and struggles while helping to augment productivity.

In short, the managed IT services definition is as follows: outsourcing your IT management and planning to a team of experts that can provide total support and solutions for all your IT assets. 

Understanding How Managed Services Work  

Composed of a team of IT professionals with years of experience in the industry, a managed services provider (MSP) will provide a collection of services and solutions that can resolve all your IT problems–from simple day-to-day tasks to troubleshooting the most sophisticated disruptions.

An IT partner provides both on-call teams ready to solve your most pressing IT issues in addition to subject matter experts that can be called upon to remediate the more complex interruptions that require specialized attention.  

This ensures that no matter what IT issues your business should encounter, an MSP would be able to quickly set about remediating it so you can get back to work.

It’s also worth noting that an MSP will take no days off, never go on vacation, and often work for less than the salary of a single IT worker, ensuring that you never face a single moment without IT support there to help.

How managed services work this effectively (and cost-effectively) is because they are able to supply on-call support to your business whenever you need, without wasting time and resources that an in-house IT employee would command on the days that their services aren’t required. 

Your information technology solutions will also be guaranteed by service level agreements. These service agreements will clearly define and guarantee quality, attentiveness, and responsiveness from your MSP.

Discovering What Managed Services Are Right for My Business 

So we understand the managed IT definition; now it’s time to dig into what managed services will provide the best yield on your investment. What’s more, in each section we’ll go over the pricing model for the type of service. 

For your own knowledge, here is everything we at Computers Made Easy offer to our clients:

• Remote monitoring and management of mobile devices, workstations, and servers
• Complete help desk and sales department tailor-made for your business needs
• Network monitoring, updating, and support 
• Cloud services and support (including cloud computing)
• Server migration, support, and management
• Digital transformation 
• Backup and disaster recovery 
• Managed security services
• Onsite specialist support
• Complete Office 365 management, protection, backup, and billing (including SharePoint)
• vCIO services
• IT planning and procurement
• Vendor management
• Mergers and acquisitions help
• Security Information and Event Management (SIEM)
• 24X7 Managed Threat Response (MTR)
• Autonomous penetration & vulnerability testing and scanning
• Phishing detection and email analysis (using A.I.)
• Phishing simulations and training for employees

However, it’s still worth noting that how managed IT services work is by tailoring a plan specifically built to meet your business’s needs, ensuring that you don’t waste any of your IT budget on superfluous services. 

Let’s now take a look at the most common service packages. 

Remote Support Only

Also, this type of service package is often the most basic one available to your business. As the name suggests, you only bear the cost for remote support and nothing else. This is great for smaller businesses that have need of only occasional support or fixing smaller issues. Most small, medium, and large businesses will, however, require more support. 

Additionally, you won’t be able to benefit from many of the best service offers and enhancements an MSP can provide, like network optimization, cloud management, vCIO services and long-term planning, and other high ROI services that can help your business become more resilient, faster, and more modern. 

The remote support only option is viable if you have an in-house team handling larger IT projects and would prefer to supplement them with an outsourced team. 

This is typically charged either on a monthly basis, an agreed-upon price-per-issue-resolved approach, or an hourly basis. 

As this model doesn’t offer the customer a well-rounded approach that would facilitate a harmonious IT environment, here at CME we don’t offer this service as it doesn’t live up to our own best practices standards that we wholly abide by.

A La Carte

If you want more than just basic remote support, the next option is a la carte service packages. Essentially, you’ll be able to select the services you need and ignore the ones you don’t, creating a fully optimized package tailored to your business’s needs with a fixed monthly fee. 

The strength of this service structure is that it is the most customizable. The downside is that the services themselves will be quite expensive relative to an end-to-end pricing model (see next section). 

For instance, while you may not anticipate needing a digital transformation expert when first constructing the package, a technological advancement in your industry or rapid growth could then necessitate the help of a transformation expert. At that point bringing one on board would be very costly, whereas in the end-to-end service model you’d have access to one at, potentially, no extra cost–it would be included in the package. 

A la carte packages are best for companies that want to supplement the gaps in their own in-house IT team. Also ideal for businesses that have very specific needs and are quite certain that those needs won’t change much in the near future. 

Prices will vary depending on the services selected, number of users, and number of devices, but are more or less predictable – so long as you aren’t constantly adding and removing services. 

As with the remote support only service description above this one, here at CME we also do not offer A La Carte service options. This service model fails to deliver optimal value to our customers, and often results in them having to pay more in the end, which is not something we stand for.

End-to-End Management

The most cost-effective plan has you benefiting from all the IT services provided by your MSP, often for an affordable price. 

Better yet, these packages are usually priced with a per-user per-month or per-device per-month model, ensuring that your IT costs are stable and predictable. 

This allows you to leverage the full expertise and resources of your MSP; protection from cybersecurity threats, vCIO consulting to build IT systems that are designed to foster (and keep up with) growth, onsite and remote support services, etc.–are all provided with end-to-end management. 

Here at CME, this well-rounded, high-value, ROI-delivering, fully-managed service is exactly what we offer to all of our customers. This service provides the ultimate framework for both exceptional IT performance as well as ideal business operational efficiency.

What Is an IT Managed Services Provider? The Answer to Your IT Troubles

Now that we have our managed IT services meaning, the next step is finding a proven MSP that can help your business resolve every single one of its IT issues–no matter where they appear.

Computers Made Easy is a seasoned provider of top technology solutions. With almost 30 years in business and 25 expert IT technicians on staff, we guarantee 99.999% network uptime, 15-minute average response time, 24/7/365 monitoring and support, long-term IT strategy development, and more.

With over 300 companies supported across the US, we’ll leverage our proven IT methodologies to ensure your business is secure, resilient, and more productive than ever. 
Get in touch with us today for a free consultation.