Outsourcing your IT department rather than using an in-house team can reap wide-ranging benefits. Apart from getting access to the experts, using a managed service provider (MSP) allows for employees to focus their efforts on business requirements and free them up from handling day-to-day IT problems.

Further benefits of managed IT support include cost-effectiveness, futureproofing, access to the latest technology, and a proactive approach to IT, resulting in a multitude of reasons why letting an MSP, such as ourselves, look after your business-critical systems is a vital step in helping your company or organisation grow.

What is a managed service provider?

Gartner defines the term managed service provider (MSP) as delivering services, such as network, application, infrastructure, and security, via ongoing and regular support.

We offer and provide proactive fully managed IT services to deliver a more structured IT strategy to improve security and facilitate efficient working. Key to this service of acting as your outsourced IT department are five crucial components: IT support, monitoring, domain names, cloud migration, and colocation.

IT Support

IT support is one of the fundamentals of our business, and it’s how we’ve built great relationships with clients for the past 30+ years. We understand that when something goes wrong, it can put your whole business on hold, ultimately losing you money. Our Bristol-based, IT helpdesk provides expert advice, delivered in a way that’s clear to you. We act as an extension of your team – providing IT support, effectively and efficiently is our main priority.

Features:

• Engineers who speak your language – Although our engineers have an in-depth knowledge of a wide range of information technologies and solutions they always speak to you in plain English
• Preventative support – When an issue arises we don’t want it to happen again, and neither do you. That’s why our engineers will thoroughly explore the problem and put measures in place to try to prevent it from happening again. A ‘quick fix’ is rarely a good fix
• Nationwide IT Support – We provide IT support for clients across the UK, with customers spanning from London, all the way up to Scotland. With 95% of issues being resolved entirely remotely, location doesn’t hold us back
• Fully outsourced or extension of your team – Whether you already have an in-house IT department or not, we can support you. If you don’t have an internal team then fully outsourcing could reduce costs rather than hiring, training, and developing a new team. If you do have an IT manager or entire IT team we are available for additional support as and when required.

Monitoring

Using Datto’s Remote Monitoring and Management (RMM) tool enables us to remotely monitor all of your IT environment and spot issues, often before they can disrupt your business. Whilst break-fix maintenance may work for some, for many, it’s far more productive to be able to prevent a problem from happening rather than waiting for it to happen and then fixing it.

Features:

• Proactive support – We can address potential issues before they become a problem because we have the ability to monitor your business’ devices, applications, and systems continuously
• Rapid response – When a particular issue or scenario arises, we are on top of it immediately and can give it the focused attention necessary to minimise any disruption
• Actionable insight – We can arm you with the insight you need about how your technology is performing, empowering you to make fact-based decisions to optimise your technology investments and improve business continuity
• World-class security – It’s more important than ever to protect your IT infrastructure and the devices you use to run your business. Datto RMM has built-in comprehensive security measures at every point

Domain names

We are Domain Name Registrars in our own right, directly registered with Nominet, the top-level registrar for all United Kingdom domain names. This means that all .UK domain names registered through us are directly managed by us on our clients’ behalf, and not through intermediaries.

This enables us to offer very fast response times, for example in setting up, changing, or removing specific domains. In addition, we provide clients with expert technical advice on all domain-related questions and full support, including DNS setup, maintenance, and tuning.

Cloud migration

Moving your business to the Cloud can be an overwhelming task but one with countless benefits. Cloud technology enables you to work more productively, collaborate effectively, better manage and protect your data and support your business growth. We’ve helped numerous clients reap the benefits of migrating to the Cloud by planning and implementing the move with minimal disruption to their business.

3 types of Cloud solutions

Private Cloud

A Private Cloud solution uses your own dedicated hosting environment. You are not sharing resources with anyone other than who you authorise within your organisation. There’s greater flexibility which allows you to host complicated or bespoke applications. Private cloud is best suited for organisations with changing requirements, complex computing needs or tight security requirements.

There are several private cloud solutions, depending on the type of service you require:

• Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS): your IT infrastructure (networks, servers, and operating systems) accessible over the internet
• Platform-as-a-service (PaaS): a platform that allows users to develop, manage and run applications through the internet
• Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS): your desktop environment is accessible through the internet allowing users to log on to a virtual desktop to access applications and store data

Public Cloud

Migrating to a Public Cloud solution is often the first step in business’s journey to the cloud. Many business products now have a cloud alternative. The most common public cloud migration we facilitate is moving to Microsoft 365. Microsoft 365 is an all-encompassing cloud solution that includes Office 365 email, Microsoft Teams, Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, Excel, Windows 10 and more.

Other public cloud solutions are also known as Software as a Service (SaaS) include:

• Google Workspace (formerly G Suite)
• Dropbox
• Salesforce
• Slack

Hybrid Cloud

More often than not, businesses require a bespoke cloud solution that utilises on-premise, private cloud, and public cloud services. A hybrid cloud solution enables you to reap the benefits of all three. A hybrid solution allows you to combine public cloud offerings (SaaS) such as Microsoft 365 with a private cloud solution such as a remote desktop environment to make a bespoke solution for your business managed by one single IT provider.

Benefits of a hybrid solution include:

• Better security and privacy
• Improved reliability
• Greater control
• Cost and energy efficiency
• Flexibility to scale up

Colocation

Colocation is the act of moving your on-premises physical server to a third-party data centre. With your servers being crucial to the running of your business, making sure they’re secure and highly available is key. As well as moving your servers to our data centres we can take care of the management of them, our experienced engineers are available to be your eyes and hands.

Benefits of Colocation

• Cost-savings
• Reduce downtime
• Security

By using our experience, expertise, and flexibility, as well as implementing the latest technology into your business, we also act as your own IT consultant. We will work closely with you to understand how your business operates, what you want to achieve, and then we’ll create a solution that works for you. Whether you have an idea of the services you require or just know the problems you want to solve, we’ll guide you every step of the way.

Get in touch with us today to find out more about working with us as your Managed Service Provider.