A growing number of businesses are turning to managed service providers (MSPs) to help them deal with various IT requirements. While MSPs have been around for a while, their value among businesses as an effective collaborative arrangement with internal IT teams is only just begun to get recognized.

How Businesses Are Leveraging Managed IT Services?

As companies become more familiar with the concept of MSPs, they are relying on them for a host of IT functions such as storage, backup and recovery, network monitoring, customer relationship management and email hosting. Many MSPs today are also offering expertise in business intelligence, data analytics and advanced application monitoring, hereby expanding the scope of collaborations between businesses and MSPs. Mobile is another area where this arrangement is gaining significant traction.

Why has Adoptability Been Slow?

Industry experts believe that the reason why businesses took so long to understand the true value of collaborating with an MSP is lack of awareness. In an era of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), many businesses as well as service providers tend to remain unclear about what exactly a managed service can do. With more service providers being able to do a better job at communicating the benefits of partnering with them, businesses are increasingly finding value in joining hands with external IT teams.

Making the Most of this Partnership

It is important to note that MSPs act as partners to one’s business’ IT goals at not as replacements to in-house IT teams. Instead of firing your entire IT staff once you sign up with an MSP, smart companies should be able to bring these service providers into the mix to free up the existing IT staff for them to focus on more core and strategic projects.

Furthermore, this helps elevate the existing IT staff and bring them to the limelight in an organization of which the core business is not IT.