If you wonder, "Do I need a managed cloud solution?" Then ask yourself these questions;
- Are you a small or medium-sized (SME) business with ambitions to grow?
- Are you a large enterprise business with technical debt and a significant refresh outlay coming?
- Do you need to leverage technology to grow your business, manage customers, and deliver services?
- Do you have a growing number of employees?
- Do you feel like you could benefit from expert IT consultancy at your disposal?
- Do you worry about data security and potentially (revenue-impacting) downtime due to technical issues?
If it's yes to ANY of those, then moving towards a managed cloud solution could be the most rewarding thing you can do this year!
If you also recognise any of the issues below too, then it is 100% the right time for you to consider moving to a managed cloud services solution.
"Not again!" recurring IT issues
If your business is suffering recurring IT issues that take time to fix, and there are frequent periods of unexpected downtime that no one can explain, alarm bells should be ringing. A good managed services provider (MSP) will have all the latest tools and technologies to identify issues before they become a problem. They will be able to detect and solve problems (usually) before you’ve noticed and prevent them from happening again.
"It’s with IT…." support issues take time
Whether it's a user error or a bug in the system, if something goes wrong, you want the problem addressed quickly. If your IT provider’s response time is slow, the downtime is wasting your time and money. Once you have logged an IT support request, a qualified Managed Service Provider (MSP) will respond to you quickly, providing clear timelines for a resolution and a clear action plan.
Working 9 to 5
Although you don’t work around clock, your infrastructure and your MSP do. A reliable MSP will have a solid monitoring solution in place, able to cope with any unwelcome surprises that may pop up at any time of the day or night before you’ve even noticed anything is wrong. System monitoring is the core of any good MSP as it provides a visual overview of the infrastructure and alerts staff to emerging issues; if that happens to be outside of support hours, then alerts get directed to on-call staff.
The dog ate my work?
Data is the core resource of any business. Few companies can function without their data or systems. Data backup is a good start, but what if the systems that you need them to work on are also down? A good Managed Service Provider will find out how long you can be without your critical systems and data. Then create a disaster recovery plan to make sure they can be restored and working before it gets critical. If settling for less than this level of service, you need to ask yourself whether you are adequately protected.
Switch it off and on again
The bigger your business gets, the more complex your IT needs become and your reliance on technology to work the first time, every time. It’s not unusual for a business to quickly outgrow the systems' capabilities and possibly the IT staff managing them.
For some businesses, this can restrict further growth by reducing productivity due to disruption caused by system failures, capacity issues or inefficiency. A professional Managed Service Provider will be able to provide you with the IT support you need as well as guidance to make sure your IT is working as hard as you are.
