What is Managed Services?
For many years, IT service was much like other service industries. Your computer would break, you’d call a service company and they would dispatch someone to fix your issue. However, in the last decade, major changes in software technologies have lead to a revolution in IT service.
These days, it’s usually unnecessary for an IT technician to be physically present to fix any issue. Using internet technologies, such as remote management and administration, IT technicians can service computers and servers from anywhere in the world, resolving software problems without ever needing to be physically present.
In addition, monitoring and management software has reach such a sophisticated level, that automated systems can often be used to monitor computer networks, correcting simple problems immediately, or sending notifications to offsite IT support well before users are even aware there are problems.
The combination of these two technologies is known as “managed services” and has become a standard in the IT industry. By combining automated monitoring with remote management, IT service and consulting companies are able to keep clients constantly under surveillance, resolving customer issues before the customers are often even aware. This improves uptime and stability for end users and requires less billable time fixing issues. The end result is a better running network for a lower, fixed cost.
Whether managed services is a good fit for your network often depends on how complex and how large a network it is. Larger or complicated networks often develop issues on a daily basis which can be difficult for IT support to catch and fix in a timely fashion and can result is expensive and time-consuming network downtime for companies. Typically, any company with over 5 computers will benefit from managed services, with companies over 10 computers seeing a marked improvement in network stability and ROI.
-Myke Schwartz, PEI
