Understanding the pros and cons of managed services

Understanding the pros and cons of managed services

Break Fix vs Managed Services

Now that we've provided a quick look at some of the limitations of break/fix IT services, we'll finish things up by looking at the pros and cons of the alternative: managed services.

Pro: Take a proactive approach

Ask any medical professional, and they'll tell you that taking care of your body over time and going in for regular checkups is a much more effective way of staying healthy than waiting until something is seriously wrong to see a doctor.

The same is true of your IT infrastructure. Using managed services is like a checkup for your IT systems, as it allows you to identify potential issues long before the symptoms of those issues would show themselves otherwise. As a result, your managed services provider allows you to get ahead of the problem, and prevent it from getting to the point where it might cause performance issues and downtime. Instead of “break/fix”, think of managed services as “never break.”

Pro: More than just maintenance

Unlike break/fix IT services, managed services extend far beyond just keeping systems up and running. Working with a managed service provider allows you to establish an ongoing relationship with a knowledgeable and experienced IT partner.

That partner will learn the ins and outs of your systems in a way that a break/fix service provider never could. In turn, this means that they’ll be able to identify opportunities to improve your IT systems, and then help you implement those suggestions. Instead of just preserving the status quo, you can be sure that working with a managed services provider will help you constantly pursue opportunities to make your IT systems more powerful, more reliable, and more tuned to the needs of your business.

Pro: Avoid IT emergencies

In an ideal world, your business would never find itself in a situation where it has to work quickly just to restore its IT systems in the aftermath of an outage. Managed services can help make this dream world a reality for your business.

As we’ve mentioned previously, one of the main goals of managed services is to prevent downtime from occurring in the first place. By identifying issues and addressing them in advance, you can greatly reduce the likelihood that you find yourself in an IT emergency situation. This means that you’ll never have to scramble just to get your systems back online. Instead, you can keep them on all the time, so that you can spend more time running your business and less time worrying about your IT systems.

Con: Monthly fee

Our final con may not truly be a con at all when you stop to think about it. While some businesses would prefer not to pay the monthly fee that managed services providers charge, the fact is that maintaining your IT systems is going to cost some amount of money one way or the other. Waiting until something goes wrong to bring in a service provider may not be the smartest way to go about paying that cost.

A managed service provider allows you to spread out this cost in small manageable payments over time, so you'll always know about how much you'll pay. On the other hand, a break/fix approach can give rise to large, unexpected payments all at once, and there's truly no way for you to know exactly how large they might end up being.

About CimaCare

CimaCare is a managed services offering is a managed services offering from Cima Solutions Group. We're excited to be offering our customers all of the benefits of managed services we've discussed in these posts. Please contact us today to learn more.

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