1 of 3: What is an MSP? Managed Service Providers in the tech industry

[Music] information technology i.t support has really evolved quite a bit since the 90s let me let's face it all of us need to be focusing on our core business so you end up when you're typically a small to mid-size business you end up outsourcing some of your i.t support services back in the 90s there was this group growing called the application service providers asps where they would provide you services based on certain functions of your it support services that you needed and then you still needed the on-site capability however now we have msps managed service providers that really touch a whole wide variety of areas but they are the ones who are able to remotely manage your own it infrastructure while you focus on your core business and provide you almost a one-stop shop for all your technology needs so what types of areas do msps touch well i mean let's take a look at it there's a huge list now and actually there's a alphabet soup of acronyms that you can have like mssp which is managed security service provider so they include things like network and infrastructure security support services print services cloud infrastructure software as a service which we've been hearing a lot called sas wireless and mobile computing data analytics and on goes the list lately there's kind of a synonym that's occurring as well between cloud service provider csp and msp because really a lot of our services for it infrastructure support are moving to the cloud and a prime example of that are just right from your collaboration file and email support services with microsoft office 365 or the google suite of applications which normally you would have had to have your own servers on site to provide those services but now these services are provided on the cloud remotely and so really the only thing that you're relying on right now besides having working devices such as your phone your desktops and whatnot is your network infrastructure and your internet connection so now your internet connection is even more important and critical to your network infrastructure if you are relying on online cloud services msps rely heavily on remote management and monitoring software rmm and these are tools that are provided to them in order to be able to remotely log into your desktop remotely be able to look at different software or patches software updates that on your systems or be a proactively alerted and monitor issues with your organization cyber security if there's some some issues or concerns that have come forward or other problems or if a service has dropped offline they're able to react much more quickly and without the ability the need to go and drive out to your organization physically they can go and log into a remote desktop when a user on your network has a problem with their desktop or their mobile device or their laptop or whatever it is that they're using to access these services some of the factors qualities if you want to call it of msps that you should consider when you're evaluating who to deal with in order to provide support for your it infrastructure are things like the responsiveness and sometimes this falls under something called sla service level agreement which is how quickly do they respond is it next business day nbd or is it within two hours is it within uh two days like i i don't know but generally these tiers of pricing are what you're going to pay for is how quickly they do they respond other things are security or backup recovery options or other options such as being a one uh shop stop for your technology needs there may be very one thing that's for sure is that pure msps are quite rare generally they provide many other services in order to round out the i.t information technology services that they provide to organizations such as being able to procure new laptops uh or devices for you or handling your mobile stuff not just managing your online services that you have on the cloud the other thing is data accessibility so for a lot of organizations you really want to make sure that your data doesn't just exist in one single location that you have multiple copies of your data online i'm a very big firm believer of backup backup backup because really your data is everything it's very easy when you're in the cloud to switch between services to add and remove changes and whatnot but your data is key to make sure that you have data integrity data accessibility and data confidentiality there are many different pricing models that are involved in msps a very common one is no longer being uh providing it services on a per project basis which are kind of one time now they focus more on a flat rate so it's per device or per user and this is great for uh organizations in order to better manage their cash flow it's great uh accountants love it because they know exactly what the it expenses are going to be each month and then you have things that could be uh like typically an additional projects so msps might have if you're doing new computer deployments or new devices those would be added costs but the monthly costs that are incurred in order to support your organization are definitely negotiated on some kind of sla basis service level agreement and what tier you're going to fit in what kind of response are you expecting are you expecting a next business day response or are you expecting a response within two hours the other thing is if you look at it from the perspective in mmp their biggest costs are going to be their rmm software the remote management and monitoring software and whatever other software that they need to provide the solution some msps bundle in the software subscriptions say microsoft office 365 licenses into the monthly fee so you pay one fixed per user fee every month and some of them only charge for their actual services so it depends on what kind of level of arrangement that you agree with them when you're negotiating and then the other thing are some projects so project work could be things like break fix so if something's broken like on hardware whatever and you need to get it repaired might not be covered under your msp sla some different projects if you have a migration project or a new backup project or a new service that you want to have available to your staff for team collaboration or file sharing or a portal that is used for your customers on a b2b or b2c basis so these are some things that you take into consideration when you're evaluating what your costs may be but the beauty of negotiating with an msp is that as i was indicating their biggest cost would be their software but it's more importantly it's their labor so they're going to figure out how much time do they need to spend on your account your organization to provide it support services and this is a win-win because let's face it i msps are really geared to smbs small to mid-sized business industry small to mid-side businesses typically don't have their own direct full-time i.t support staff and so therefore this is a way to outsource your i.t requirements however that's not to say that large enterprises don't also use msps they will use them to do it staff augmentation maybe there are certain specialized areas such as security or other cloud services or portals such as sharepoint that they want to have access to and it's better to have that specialized i.t knowledge outsourced to an sp msp than it is to go and have that expensive knowledge in-house so take that into consideration when you're negotiating with an msp as to what level of contract what you're paying for and what type of services you're needed in order to figure out what makes sense for your organization because it's very difficult to compare apples to apples in the msp space because everybody is offering different things and as i indicated there aren't too many pure msps out there most of them are a one-stop shop [Music] you

Channel: David Papp

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Keywords: technology, news, tech, msp, managed service provider, cloud service provider, csp, rmm, remote monitoring and management, pricing models, costs, smb, enterprise, it, it support, it augmentation, what is

Id: Ezwg1dKn1HM

Length: 9min 9sec (549 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 27 2021