Not too long ago, in an age before consumerized services, you would have to go out on the street to hail a cab. You would have to initiate a conversation and depending on your route and fare, time of the day or night, the driver might or might not decide to go with you. That worked fine for decades and decades. Then ride-sharing services and cab-aggregators came into being. They streamlined everything. Now, you can book a cab from your sofa. You also get the details of your fare, the best possible routes to your destination, and even the details of your driver instantly.
How do cab sharing aggregator examples relate to IT services? Well. Traditional IT support methodologies required an on-site technician to schedule a visit, find the problem, report, calculate the cost and materials required for the fix, then come back and schedule another visit to actually fix the issue. These types of maintenance activities were called reactive IT maintenance (break/fix maintenance). The advent of remote monitoring and management (RMM) tools however, helped organizations adopt more proactive measures for IT. In effect, managed services provide more streamlined and consistent support for IT than legacy measures.
What are remote monitoring and management (RMM) tools? RMM tools are tools used by managed service providers to provide support and services to a client organization. These tools usually offer high visibility into an organization’s processes. RMM tools allow a company to evolve from ‘break-fix’ methodologies through proactive services and engage with a fixed price. This only leaves the ‘reactive’ part of IT maintenance to service desk teams (which can also be outsourced) like alerting a customer of the issue. Rather than having a customer face an issue, and then come
Here, we list some of the most common benefits associated with the managed services model and RMM.
1) Focus on Value
When your staff has to prepare a list of items to fix before the next site visit, figure out how to reach there and multiple other mundane tasks, they are not providing value for your company. Instead, outsourcing to an MSP can help you identify and fix issues proactively through RMM tools. This frees your executive staff to work on strategic measures that underpin your company initiatives and goals.
2) Fixed Fees
With an MSP, you can have a pre-agreement price fixed based on your requirements. This means, the onus will remain on the MSP to ensure the IT environment performs optimally within the decided budget. This is a departure from traditional IT models where billing is done hourly, where the risk is more on the customer.
3) Automation
Managed services and RMM tools negate the need for an employee to be physically present at a client site. The best RMM providers automate monitoring and notify you customized alerts. These can range from automated alerts for system health and utilizations, patches required in OS and applications, virus or malware threats, software deployments, etc.
4) Better Inventory Management
Managing inventory with Excel spreadsheets can be cumbersome. RMM tools combined with the best enterprise software on offer from MSPs can simplify software license tracking, warranty renewals, allocation of assets, and hardware lifecycle management.
5) Faster Resolution
Legacy ‘break/fix’ support models only scheduled a reactive visit after an incident had occurred. Even then, the scheduling was dependent on staff availability and technical knowledge of resources. RMM tools proactively search for issues and often catch them before they become critical that results in faster resolution times.
The MSP support model has sometimes been called the future of technical support. This is because an able MSP helps you worry less about technology and more on your industry disruption. Ready to smarten up your IT? Ask for a FREE Consultation today!
