What is a Managed Service Provider?

You may have asked yourself a few times the question, “what is a Managed Service Provider?”. Well, I can hopefully answer your questions of what an MSP is, when they began, how they have transformed, and how Nuvea Group and our partner’s can be your Outsourced IT Dept. at a fraction of the cost of dedicated IT staff.

To begin with, Managed Services are a way of outsourcing management for all IT systems of a company, taking over responsibilities and resources on behalf of the client in order to strategically improve their IT operations. Ultimately this cuts expenses, downtime, and allows the client to focus on their business. Managed Services are a direct alternative to the break/fix model that directly affects a business’ ability to operate efficiently. The break/fix model was often extremely costly because it caused businesses to have excessive downtime, lost files, and the extra high expense of hiring IT help to bring the business back to an efficient working place. Managed Service Providers offer subscription or partnership model where the client or company pays monthly for delivered set of managed services that provide on-going support of IT related systems.

The break/fix model was the first to rise as a service to IT systems in the early 1990’s as businesses both small and large began to adopt more complicated computer and phone systems. By the late 90’s to early 2000’s, managed services began as a new model of service for business that gave rise to increased productivity and less downtime in the workplace.

Today, it is more important than ever to protect businesses with a team of IT professionals. As technology moves forward at an increasingly rapid rate, it is even more difficult to keep up without a team of experts providing support for a company’s IT systems. Viruses, malware, and ransomware attacks increase in rate as technology moves forward making it imperative that environments are made secure. Reactive IT is much more painful and costly than remaining proactive in approach.

Modern companies understand what it takes to keep their businesses running efficiently and it is becoming increasingly common and resourceful for even small companies to partner with Managed Service Providers. In fact, according to Gartner, IT outsourcing is among the fastest growing security sectors. Companies are becoming unable to manage their IT systems in a cost-efficient and secure manner on their own. It is estimated that by 2020, that over 60% of organizations will have invested in managed services that focus on security such as data-loss prevention and encryption (Gartner 2017). Currently, around 35% of companies are utilizing these tools to protect their environments.