By: Jeff Prouse, Vice-President of Technical Services
Today’s companies use digital technologies for all aspects of their corporate strategy, from growing their market share to enhancing customer service capacity. However, emerging vulnerabilities also creep into the organizational IT structure as new software programs or hardware acquisitions increase its complexity. Many companies avoid both the threats and the hassles involved in managing their continually evolving technology infrastructure by retaining the services of a managed IT services provider.
Overseers of the Digital Operation
The term managed desktop support refers to the range of services provided by many managed services providers (MSPs). While desktop implies a fixed computer, it can also refer to the full scope of digital technology used by a company, including laptop and mobile devices, the software programs and databases that drive business decisions and connect customers, and the servers, applications, and extended services that most companies now access on a daily basis. Managed desktop support providers offer a single point of management to engage and optimize the capacity of the entire digital corporate structure.
The concept of managed desktop support – hiring a third-party professional to handle all IT needs – grew in popularity as more companies realized that internal management of their IT assets was too expensive or too risky. Those companies struggled with many aspects of IT management.
- They didn’t have the expertise or finances to keep up with constant digital evolution.
- The number of emerging threats from both external and internal sources required ever-increasing investment, often at the expense of critical business needs.
- They were unable to adopt or adapt to new technologies because their legacy programming and IT infrastructure was outdated or incompatible with new versions or models both existing and emerging technologies.
Managed IT Services Provider Benefits
Consequently, many companies redirected their in-house IT resources to engage the services of a managed IT services provider. These providers offer an ever-growing list of benefits:
Improved efficiencies
An MSP has the expertise needed to oversee not just the functions of each separate technical asset but also how they all function together as a single operating entity. Not surprisingly, the IT professional is often able to identify redundancies available for elimination as well as programming that has yet to be harnessed to its fullest capacity. Half of the respondents to a CompTIA survey said improved efficiency was a major reason why they moved their technical operations to a managed IT services provider.
Speed
Companies today struggle to keep up with the competition, an effort made more challenging when IT problems both increase expenses and reduce production. A service provider is focused on maintaining enterprise technology at its peak performance, so company leaders can concentrate on tweaking products and services to match market demands better.
Corporate coordination
Many companies today are geographically spread across cities, regions, and even internationally. However, their technology has to work in sync regardless of where or when it is used. A managed IT services provider assures the coordination and full implementation of each separate digital element of the corporate infrastructure, including desktop and laptop computers, mobile devices, databases, and programming upon which each aspect of the company relies. MSPs ensure streamlined operations across the company even when adding new technologies or transitioning away from legacy programs.
Improve Customer Satisfaction with Managed IT Services
Keeping the customer happy is increasingly challenging as almost unlimited choices in today’s global marketplace bombard them from every device. Many corporations use their MSP to ensure prompt and comprehensive interactions between the company and its consumers and also to build on that data so that customer satisfaction is consistently improving.
When seeking a managed IT services provider, SMB leaders should look for service providers with experience in both managed desktop support and managed IT services to ensure that every current and future digital opportunity is optimized and maximized.