Post-pandemic market conditions demand operational efficiency for business survival. A robust, cyber-resilient network is essential, particularly for resource-limited organizations that might neglect network management while focusing on their core business. This oversight significantly increases vulnerability to cyberattacks, making managed IT services a potential solution.
The managed data center services market, valued at $446.3 billion in 2023, is projected to reach $1 trillion by 2030, growing at a 12.9% CAGR. This growth is driven by increasing cloud adoption, data security needs and complex IT infrastructure. Businesses' growing reliance on digital operations and hybrid/multi-cloud environments fuels demand for secure and scalable data center management.
What is Managed Services?
Managed IT services can be understood as the outsourcing of certain, or all, functions of IT to a third-party services provider. These providers are often referred to as Managed Service Providers or MSPs. Managed Service Providers typically provide different tiers of services, from basic IT equipment service and maintenance to full-fledged IT team outsourcing. Companies typically engage Managed Service Providers to complement or entirely replace in-house IT teams to take care of day-to-day IT maintenance, operations, service desk requests, cybersecurity requirements, and more.
4 Advantages of Managed Service Providers
Managed IT services often offer round-the-clock monitoring of your business network, take over the responsibilities for day-to-day operations, management, maintenance and repair of your infrastructure. Their approach relies on predictive maintenance and proactive problem solving. Managed Service Providers typically work with stated service level agreements, in which they commit to solving problems remotely or in-person within a stipulated timeframe, and often offer one-call resolutions.
Let’s take a look at some of the advantages it provides:
1: Significant productivity increases
System failures and shutdowns can stall progress in its tracks, causing frustrating customer and employee experiences. Managed IT services draw on a host of high-end network and security tools and strategies that may not be available to you as an individual organization because of prohibitive costs. This ensures a smoother workflow and operational experience. Your employees can focus more on their daily tasks and deliver higher levels of productivity.
2: Enhanced security and compliance
While multinational corporations can afford to pour in billions to ensure stronger defenses, smaller businesses can’t afford to do the same. Compliance plans are also getting stricter, with higher fines and penalties attached for non-adherence. To make matters even more complicated, most employees are now working in a semi-permanent work-from-home scenario that makes endpoint security prone to more risks.
Managed service providers can help companies strengthen and extend in-built network security and resilience to secure endpoints and ensure that your data remains safe both at rest and in transit. MSPs can help you not only comply and keep up with mandated policies, but maintain pace with new regulations. They can also help you standardize policies in-house and create mandatory regulations and security protocols for all suppliers and contractors to prevent supply chain attacks.
3: Efficient, reliable IT operations
In-house IT staff are overburdened with service requests and lack the bandwidth to keep up with endless cycles of service patches and requests to focus on designing and protecting the overall network. You can easily enhance their capabilities through the services of managed service providers.
If in-house IT staff are beleaguered with patch cycles, migrations and service requests, they can’t devote their energy to the work that actually needs their attention: projects and company-level tasks.
4: Cost effective
A long-term partnership with a reliable MSP can provide increasing scalability, flexibility and latency for your business as it continues to grow. It will help you keep your costs predictable, manage outgoing expenses and improve return on investment.