What are Managed Services Provider, and Why Should You Care?

Due to the shortened technology cycles, there is continued competition and mounting infrastructure costs. As a result of that, telecom operators are constantly under relentless pressure in order to manage their capital expenditures associated with the network deployment and to reduce network operating costs. Hence, many of the telecom operators are increasingly addressing these challenges through adoption of outsourcing solutions. Outsourcing to an outsourcing partner, allows a telecom operator transfer its operation of its proprietary network to a third party supplier of greater scale termed as Managed Service Provider in the Telecom domain. The outsourcing solutions allows telecom operators to control the capital expenditures associated with asset management and technology upgrades while also benefitting from overall lower operating costs resulting from the synergies produced by a specialist network service provider with greater economies of scale.

Every Small Business Unit usually lacks the resources and time to fight cyber security threats, and hence they find it beneficial to outsource their task to Managed Service Providers.

Every Managed Service Provider goes through a dilemma while catering to its clients. Being an Outsourcing Services partner, every MSP has to service its clients’ equipment. In that scenario how will an MSP maximize the value and use the assets of the clients to their satisfaction at the lowest possible cost to themselves in order to make profits.

The biggest challenge faced by the Managed Service Providers today is in the re-investment by Clients in in-house IT resources. According to reports, MSPs are finding that, somewhat ironically, there is a threat to their services and it may not be required in near future as the firms have taken a stand now to invest in their in-house IT staff that can be fatal for their business growth. As a result, the pressure on the MSPs to demonstrate their value to their clients has grown two folds. In order to address this concern, MSPs have started offering their customers a VCIO to can expand their value under the buoyant economy and offer value outside of the usual phone calls for assistance. A vCIO can help clients implement IT solutions or simply provide guidance and let IT team take it from there. The value lies in the increased efficiency and lowered IT costs for your business.

 

The first step an MSP should take is to assess the client. This is basically done in order to identify the gaps and security risks through a proven method that brings large amount of evidence to customers.

The next step is to address.This includes creating projects to bring the customer up to an acceptable level of risk based on those determined gaps. The third step is to maintain. Here, MSPs earn their monthly recurring revenue for helping the customer maintain an acceptable level of risk.Finally, MSPs must understand that selling security and compliance services is different from selling traditional IT or managed services. It's a little bit different than traditional IT managed services, yet the security and compliance is kind of fused with the managed services. "It helps MSPs to have a substantial differentiator when they're trying to get new business. A very good way of having upsell and cross-sell opportunities is existing clients.