What are Managed Service Providers?
Managed Service Providers (MSPs) make the lives of business owners easier by taking on the responsibility of providing IT services. In short, this allows business owners to focus less on the technology and more on actually using it! While it sounds simple on the surface, there are two distinct types of MSPs – reactive and proactive.
Reactive Managed Services
For decades, many companies in every industry have relied on reactive “break-fix” managed services to meet their needs. Like the name suggests, this traditional model only addresses the issues when they become too big to ignore – when something breaks, it gets fixed.
Reactive IT support often comes with a crippling side effect: downtime. After an offsite tech is dispatched to a business’ site, they then have to go through the process of diagnosing and treating every possible problem before implementing fixes. This lengthy process is not only time consuming, but it can also be incredibly pricey once service has been restored.
Proactive Managed Services
In the modern era, proactive managed services are, well, proactive – fixing a problem before it even becomes one. By performing scheduled diagnostics and maintenance, the proactive service approach means that support teams preeminently tackle problems, ensuring that the services rarely – if ever – go down. When taking into consideration the overall cost of an hour of downtime for a company, the value in adopting proactive IT services is clear.
The Verdict: Proactive > Reactive
With a forward-thinking approach, proactive services allow businesses to continue operations without the downtime and unforeseen costs that come with the outdated reactive “break-fix” services approach. With one predictable monthly cost, businesses can have the peace of mind that surprise emergency system repair bills are a thing of the past. MSPs take away the task of keeping up with the tech, allowing for increased efficiency and business optimization that ultimately creates better businesses for the busy modern age.