What are managed services, what types of managed services are there, and how can they benefit your business?
What are Managed Services?
These are a form of IT service provider. Businesses outsource the management of certain services, usually related to the cloud, to IT support companies with whom they maintain a contractual relationship.
How Popular Are Managed Services?
In 2015 a survey showed that 66% of businesses had been utilizing one of the types of manages services the year before. Reliable managed services are increasingly popular with businesses across the board.
What are Some of the Managed Services Benefits?
When surveyed, 61% of surveyed companies, cite return on investment as one of their reasons for going with a managed services model. Enhanced security and compliance was the primary reason for choosing managed services according to 38% of companies surveyed. And since the average cost of a data breach is up 15% from 2014–to $3.5 million–security is a serious consideration. Security breaches also cause more than eight hours of lost work time for 31% of those affected, and more than half of all small and medium businesses suffered a cyber attack in the last year.
What Types of Managed Services are There?
The most basic types of managed services are basically an elaborate backup plan. They assist in disaster recovery and manage backups. Some of the other types of manages services include managed billing, which helps you with a lot of accounting tasks like budgeting and tracking, cloud sourcing, which replaces a lot of traditional IT functions and gives you the freedom to concentrate on other issues, and what is known as cloud bursting. Cloud bursting provides you with more resources for computing when you need data space.
Is This All Managed Services Can Do?
Not at all. There are many boutique managed services that will adapt their offerings to the specific needs of any company, delivery a vast array of outsourced IT and accounting operations, and aggressively protect, collate, and recover your data as needed.
What’s the Future of Managed Services?
For now, it looks like this type of service isn’t going anywhere fast. While some of the biggest companies can afford to take care of all these things in-house, most companies benefit from outsourcing at least some of their IT issues. As the world goes more and more digital, the need is expected to grow. The number of connected devices in the world is expected to go from 13 billion to 50 billion in 2020. During that same period, the managed security services market is set to double.
Using managed services is an efficient and cost-effective way for a business to stay current on technology while having access to the skills needed to manage service and risk in an ever-changing digital world. Now that you know more about it, consider looking into how a managed services provider might be a benefit to your company.
