What are managed services for small businesses?

What are managed IT services?

Managed IT services are a suite of solutions by an outsourced IT service provider. After a consultation and assessment, you get a tailored support, management and monitoring for a combined monthly rate. For small business owners, it allows you to better understand the expenses associated with your technology and the support it needs to run effectively.

Managed services can include the management of your networking and devices, cloud services and data, cyber security, and unified communications. At its core, managed service providers maintain your IT environment and help each part work more efficiently. They tend to be responsible for providing IT support, fixing systems and devices, and give your team troubleshooting support should issues arise in daily operations.

What is a managed services model?

While some businesses may have a designated IT person or team within their organisation, the managed services model was developed as a way to outsource a range of technologies in order to reduce overall costs and to ensure ongoing, proactive management of business systems. The managed services model is a subscription model and your IT provider can look after your technology on-site or remotely, depending on your agreement.

What are the technology benefits of managed services?

Many businesses incorporate technology throughout their operations. From very simple systems to more complex IT architectures, engaging with an outsourced provider can help optimise important business technology and make sure they work together well.

Here are the main 3 technology benefits:

1. Keep up with new technology trends

Just like the technology we own as consumers, our phones and laptops, and the appliances we have in our home, we know there’s something new and shiny that comes through every year. While business technology tends to have a longer shelf-life, maintaining existing systems with emerging innovations includes financial, human and time resources.

Researching and assessing whether technology can help to enhance your business involves some level of expertise and valuable industry insight. Through your managed services agreement, you get a dedicated team helping you implement new technology while ensuring it can be compatible with existing systems. This means you don’t have to completely disregard what you’ve already invested in your IT environment.

2. Greater scalability

As technology improves, businesses can have the difficult task of adapting to everchanging economic and digital disruptions. With a managed services model, your business can scale up or down depending on your circumstances. A subscription-based model means that if your requirements change, your provider can implement a solution that best suits your needs. This is particularly valuable for businesses experiencing sudden growth or businesses trying to respond to disruptions in their business operations.

3. Get the best IT experts

For businesses that haven’t yet adopted the managed services model, they might have an internal IT team to build, manage, and troubleshoot problems across the organisation. An experienced and qualified IT team for your organisation is beneficial if their skills can accommodate the additional growth of your business. However, in the managed services model you can scale up or down in relation to how much support or maintenance you need to operate your business. As well as this, outsourcing your IT, even partially, means that you can access specialists within specific fields. In this case, while you may have an internal IT team who have an abundance of knowledge in cloud or cybersecurity they might lack in other fields in ICT, such as unified communications or networking. This alleviates the pressure on your existing IT teams while ensuring that your business receives industry insights in emerging innovations.

What are the business benefits of managed services?

While looking after your technology is part of managed services, there are other business-based benefits that relate to outsourcing your IT.

Here are the 3 main business benefits:

3. Business continuity

Your outsourced IT provider aligns their services and products with your overall business goals. They assess and strategically plan your IT environment so that you have a roadmap ahead for what your business might look like in a year or two years’ time. As threats to your IT infrastructure develop, your IT provider helps to minimise risks related to downtime, viruses, and system crashes.

2. Proactive support

Through managed services, a specialised IT team not only fix issues as they arise, but they provide proactive monitoring of your IT environment so that potential risks are identified before they happen. For example, in terms of cybersecurity or network security, instead of fixing the issue after a breach, your outsourced IT team can help you identify the weak links before malicious hackers access your business information or systems.

3. Meet regulations & compliance

Small and medium businesses are obligated to meet standards and requirements in relation to their IT, especially when it comes the protection of customer data. A managed IT provider aligns their services with your business needs as well as ensuring compliance and regulations are met.

How to choose a managed services provider

Many providers tailor their services and products to your business needs. Optus IT Services, you get a dedicated team looking after your technology environment end-to-end. Learn more about our range of managed services across networking, cyber security and cloud services.

*This article contains promotion for Optus products and services