Professional IT professionals are hard to find, especially if you have a small business on a small budget. Most small and medium-sized enterprises thus opt for managed service providers (MSPs). MSPs offer a wide range of IT services, outsourced from experts.
Managed IT providers will deliver services with ongoing and regular support. They allow organizations to focus on core projects and strategic initiatives, instead of the day-to-day operations. It will save money as many managed services cost less than other traditional services and staff, so it will also be cost efficient for your business. With an MSP, you can have many options depending on the service level you select.
Projections show that the value of the MSP market will be over $240 billion by the end of 2021. This has made it a lucrative business with promising growth and returns in the future. If you have any interest in starting your own MSP business in IT, you may need a few things, to begin with. In this article, we look into some of the things you may need before starting managed IT services as a business.
Training
Before starting your managed IT services as a business, you must enroll in a sales training program. Even if you will not do the sales personally, the training can allow you to identify the ideal salespeople for your business. One of the greatest challenges that most business owners face is hiring salespeople, and yet they don’t have any idea about sales.
Moreover, you might need to find a few clients before you start hiring your sales team. Sales training gives one the required skills to achieve this. It can help to improve your networking skills, as well as assist you to collect the required referrals and leads—even during informal meetings. Although formalized sales training might be ideal, you should also look for podcasts, blogs, and books to assist you to polish your sales skills.
Support all infrastructure options
Today, an on-premise data center is not the only option for data storage. It is important to have an integrated monitoring and security platform. The platform supports both physical and virtual infrastructures. These include hybrid, private, and public clouds.
Single platform approach
Before starting your business, ensure you have consolidated solutions. These should link services in security, performance, and compliance. In the past, you could solve personal problems with stove-piped solutions. But things have changed now. This is, for the big part, due to how we create data and share it within a firm for collective decision-making.
A single platform is essential in lowering the return on investment (ROI). It is also cheaper to buy and install. The single platform approach helps save on IT resources for installation and support. Thus, instead of having separate security, performance monitoring, and compliance products, you can try the single platform approach. Also, harnessing all data in one integrated solution makes evaluation easier and faster. This is unlike having varying solutions. It also helps to identify the main source of the challenge.
Offer remote management and technical support
MSPs should be in a position to identify and solve remote problems with ease, something that Computer One does very easily. This is because firms now have data hubs or major computing centers in varying locations. This is not the case only for multinational conglomerates. It is also advisable to offer a support agreement. This is because most organizations are now in support of the bring-your-own-device policies. Most are working with other remote computing capabilities.
The support agreement handles challenges that pop up away from the main headquarters. The solution should enable easy communication with remote user systems. Mobile gadgets, in particular, are key. This should be possible without having to open up security firewalls. Hackers and other security breaching threats should not have access to such links.
Visualization hypervisors
Many organizations now have more than two separate virtual machine hypervisors. This has become a common practice in most organizations. The virtual machine hypervisors run separate virtual machine workloads. This means that the managed tech service providers must find a resolution. The resolution should be agnostic to the hypervisor. The function of supporting various cloud-computing architectures becomes easier. You can either host this in the data centers of the service providers or on the client’s site. Such architectures can be public clouds such as Amazon Web Services. They can also be private clouds that cloud service providers build.
Support a multi-tenant architecture and use it to the most
Managed service providers make significant investments in their business infrastructure. With this, they should be in a position to amortize the cost of investment across many customers. A multi-tenant architecture that is reliable and secure can go a long way in amortization. The system should offer the services to clients in a seamless manner.
Managed service providers can gain extra and key financial value to their services. This is possible through the ability to share compute, storage, and networking resources. Ensure that the resources reach as wide a client range as possible. Do this with care, to avoid exposing crucial client information to other tenants.
Pricing model
Lastly, you need to have a good pricing model. This will ensure that you enjoy a healthy profit margin. According to the experts from Jackson managed IT services company, you might need to set your pricing model following a baseline price that dictates your profit margin—this will ensure that you don’t go below that baseline when creating a proposal for your clients.
Bottom Line
There you go! This is what you need to start Managed IT services as a business. However, you should note that becoming a managed services provider requires a lot of careful consideration, planning, and great strategy. And, while this might look very tedious, it helps you to avoid any possible issues down the line once your business is up and running.
