The Biggest Benefits of Managed Support

35% of UK businesses entrust a third party to manage their IT. In this article Emma Stott, Customer Service Director at Chess, summarises the three key reasons for this:

• Reduce your costs >
• Improve access to skills >
• Improve your cover >

Reduce your costs

According to a Deloitte study in 2020 the main reason organisations consider outsourcing is to reduce cost. Internal IT costs are spiralling due to:

• The advent of the cloud and platforms such as Azure and Microsoft 365 which do not make running an IT estate any simpler.
• Increased demands due to increased security threats and home working
• Digital transformation projects taking people away from day to day tasks

You can turn to a managed service supplier who can provide access to a team of people at all hours of the day or night. This can help you bolster IT resource when you need it without having these people permanently on your payroll. Most companies are now wholly reliant on their IT systems to be able to provide service to their customers so extended downtime costs money and erodes trust.

Improve access to skills

Hiring skilled engineers to administer and manage your IT estate is challenging, especially when it comes to security. Skills are in short supply and larger companies are widening their recruitment efforts outside of their usual locations due to an acceptance of home working. All this is driving salaries up and reducing the availability of good people. MSPs can give you access to a range of the highly skilled IT professionals that it wouldn’t make sense for you to employ but are invaluable when you need them.

Improve your cover

Customer service is increasingly a round-the-clock challenge as customers become more demanding of the organisations they work with. Our people also want to work flexibly and expect to be able to work from anywhere at anytime securely. 9am to 5pm is only a third of the day after all, and hackers and other disruptive influencers may well operate in different time zones to you and most likely prefer to work on your systems when nobody is “at home”. An outsourced provider can help you extend your hours of cover to make sure your systems are up when your people and customers need them.

At Chess we provide a range of reactive and proactive support packages to help you reduce your costs and work better together. Learn more about these services here.

A few of the features you can expect when you partner with Chess, include:

• Daily status reports detailing the key metrics of your systems (backup reports, antivirus definitions, disk space etc.). Any alert failing our thresholds automatically creates a support incident for one of our engineers to resolve.
• In the rare occasions we require escalated vendor support, we have Director level contacts to ensure quick resolution.
• Customer Portal, which provides the ability to log support incidents, review previous incidents and SLA metrics with 100% transparency.
• Strategic relationships with our people, who attend board meetings to help guide business requirements.
• Remote support via a dedicated service desk that will remotely diagnose and repair faults, install and configure update, and maintain software.
• Antivirus and endpoint management to secure your network from the threats associated with remote connection.
• Patch management, installation of the latest software and operating system security patches and upgrades.