Professional IT services definitely have a niche for themselves in the U.S. small business landscape: Of the roughly 3.7 million small businesses operating in the United States currently, over 57% of them feel a strong need to improve their existing IT infrastructure. This means improvements to the quality of their security infrastructure, IT staffing and of course, data handling.
Moreover, IT has become more important than ever with the unprecedented rise in work-from-home labor patterns that the COVID pandemic has set off. According to the numbers, 64% of all business enabled new telecommuting strategies for their employees and more than half of these intend to keep using those strategies in 2021 and beyond. The solution: a Managed Services Provider.
What Managed Service Providers are and How They Help
In addressing all of these trends, managed services from a highly competent third party IT provider can offer a uniquely efficient and adaptive solution. What a Managed Services Provider (MSP) does can vary somewhat, but a highly capable operator will give your small business a thoroughly robust IT solution that lets you focus on growing your business while they provide and manage your IT infrastructure.
This means delivering:
- A virtual IT Department staffed by professionals at not payroll cost to you.
- Always-online critical business servers and systems for things like email, business applications, data storage and remote office connectivity.
- Top-shelf antivirus and anti-malware security monitoring software.
- 24-hour help desk support for you and your employees.
- Network monitoring, systems updates and patch management that run 365 days per year on a 24×7 basis.
- Personal IT consultants that deliver personalized technical insights on demand.
- Frequent hardware and software health checks for things such as CPU performance or disk and server space.
- Full remote backup of company data backed by professionally designed disaster plans.
The above are the core services of a high quality managed services provider who knows how to handle IT and business data security. Here are several key areas of small business IT in which Managed Services can be vitally useful.
Cybersecurity
The modern business world is beset by a steadily rising tide of external security threats. But with the help of a Managed Services Provider, you can keep abreast of them without you having to form your own in-house IT team that will try to do the same at a cost of hundreds of payroll hours.
Database Management
By handling your database management through external experts, you can ensure that your systems stay healthy, up-to-date and fully operational regardless of how complex your needs are. Managed Service Providers also handle security and bug monitoring for databases regardless of their type or structure.
Cloud Computing and Server Management
One of your most precious business assets is your data itself, but it’s also one of the most difficult to secure because it has to be actively used at all times. This applies especially when remote access is needed by multiple offices or telecommuting employees at random times of the day. An effective Managed Services Provider can offer secured administration of the servers and cloud accounts that keep your data freely accessible to employees so that it doesn’t also become accessible to anyone else.
Operating Systems Management
Whether the operating systems in use throughout your company are Corporate Windows copies, Linux variants or more exotic enterprise solutions such as CentOS, Fedora, Ubuntu or Debian, Managed Service Providers can handle them all. They can also work in collaboration with your own IT staff to ensure that these OS platforms are kept up to date and handling your underlying data smoothly.
Finding a Capable Managed Services Provider
A Managed Services Provider like Great Lakes Computer Corporation is specifically trained and equipped to handle the assorted technical IT solutions that your small business needs. Great Lakes’ Managed Services offer a comprehensive set of IT solutions that deliver personalized 24-hour systems monitoring, rigorous data security and a whole host of support services for your company’s valuable data, software and hardware. Our IT specialists will allow your company to have a world-class IT department that doesn’t create a whole new payroll category on your annual operating budget.
