Break the cycle: Proactive vs. reactive managed services

Imagine the following:

A few days ago, a large segment of your office experienced network interruptions, causing your team to suffer downtime and send in a slew of tickets to your managed service provider (MSP), the external IT team that you’ve hired to handle these types of technology issues. Today, a few employees have clicked on a suspicious email link and their computers are crashing. They are behind on deadlines, and having to scramble to deliver to clients.

If this is a familiar scenario to you, it is time to rethink your managed service provider's approach. If you were to add up the time spent on these two incidents alone, you’d calculate hours of unplanned downtime. Unfortunately, your business is still caught in the never-ending cycle of an outdated, break-fix solution model of managed IT service, also referred to as reactive managed services. Once unplanned issues occur, your MSP offers break-fix services after you've likely already lost money in downtime costs. 

Both of those incidents were almost surely preventable, and likely would have been—with a proactive managed service provider. 

Today's businesses need a proactive approach

Today, with the dependence on newer technologies such as SaaS offerings and cloud computing services make it essential to have a more sophisticated model of managed IT service that focuses on strategy, monitoring, infrastructure, and security—ensuring that problems are surfaced before they become critical issues. Here, clients enjoy minimal downtime, which allows their business processes to continue uninterrupted. Working with a service provider that offers proactive managed support is essential to avoid regular service interruptions, problematic downtime situations, unchecked performance issues, and major security breaches. 

Pricing models for proactive managed support tend to be fixed-price, monthly-billed service, yielding a predictable monthly bill. This is crucial for managed services clients, who unlike large enterprises that more often have in-house IT teams, need to be able to more easily account for what is in their budgets as a small and medium-sized business. Companies depending on a reactive IT support model don't enjoy this same luxury.  Unpredictable downtime timeframes, which are common to break-fix solutions, can often translate to additional costs. 

Gain a competitive advantage with proactive IT support

The benefits of outsourcing your IT support to a managed service provider are many. 

• Proactive monitoring and management

  Proactive managed service ensures that your devices and services are backed up, monitored, and managed remotely. With real-time IT health and performance alerts, issues never become problems for your team.

• IT support/Help desk

  Having proactive managed IT support often means access to live help desk support, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. For SMBs who have leaner teams, it is especially crucial to have a team of engineers ready to help your employees resolve issues as quickly as possible.

• Server & cloud services backup solutions

  Server crashes can mean long hours of downtime and major disruptions to the function of your business. Sometimes, these issues might be caused by something as simple as basic human error, a power outage, or even faulty hardware. With the right backup solution deployed on-site, you can be assured that you're covered with local backup, cloud backup, and object-level exchange restore. In the event of a disaster, MSPs can also offer backup and disaster recovery solutions.

• IT Infrastructure improvement with cloud hosting solutions

  Many times, a business’s existing IT infrastructure can be limited or outdated. Any number of calamities, errors, or cyberattacks can cause IT system outages. In the face of these events, it is important for businesses to know that data is safe and easy to access. Reliance on a solely on-site, physical server can be limiting in a few ways. First, you can only store up to a certain amount of information. Also, in the event of a crash, your data may be inaccessible for long periods of time, or even permanently.
  
  Using an MSP to set up your IT infrastructure in the cloud is a crucial step to making your systems more reliable and scalable. You’ll want to find an MSP like Milner, that offers fully managed virtual servers housed in our secure data centers. Cloud servers like ours give you access to cutting-edge technologies without having to replace outdated hardware and software. 

• Protection from security threats

  Today’s business needs a proactive approach to network and data security that prevents hackers from disrupting network operations, rather than trying to scramble to recover once they occur. Proactive security and 24/7/365 monitoring from an MSP Network Operations Center (NOC), allows potential security issue detection, anti-virus patches and other software updates to happen quickly. 

At Milner, we offer a comprehensive, tiered suite of proactive managed service offerings. Our managed IT services are tailored to optimize your organization’s IT infrastructure and performance, empowering clients to deliver customer satisfaction and meet business goals. If you’re looking for the peace of mind, improved productivity, and reliability that come with a top-of-the-line with our top-of-the-line managed IT services, schedule a free IT health check or contact us to get started!