Over the last decade, enterprises have significantly invested in business information systems. These same organizations are finding themselves being forced to drop a significant amount of money into IT budgets to manage, maintain, and support these systems. With the competitive business landscape today, organizations are devising different strategies to lower their operational costs.

Departments within the organizations, such as Information Technology, are no longer exempted from budget cuts, and as a result enterprises have been forced to answer the question: what are managed IT services?

Companies are now outsourcing some of these non-core activities, enabling organizations to diversify their focus towards other strategic projects and value-adding activities while strengthening the company's key competencies.

A managed service involves outsourcing day to day in-house IT operations as a strategic initiative purposely to improve the organizations operations. These managed services include: lifecycle build/maintenance activities, production support, applications, databases, business to business integration (Supply chain management), communication services (video conferencing, tele-presence, telephony operations, internet) and information services such as backup, storage, security, network management & monitoring. A Managed Services Provider (MSP) is an Information Technology (IT) service provider mandated with the responsibility of availing pre-defined sets of services to a client either proactively or as stipulated in their written agreement. MSP's come with different tariffs structured to accommodate the needs of different clients. These service providers can bill the customer's upfront, off an ongoing flat rate, fixed monthly, quarterly, semi-annually, or annual fee. These tariffs provide the client with some level of predictability in relation to the IT department budget.

Key Benefits of Managed Service Provider
Enhanced performance and reliability. Since MSP's handle huge volumes of IT related activities such as communication, storage, databases, and web related systems, the rich experience gained as a result of managing diverse range of activities from different companies, is more likely to be passed on to the clients. Often MSP data centers are professionally equipped with a state of the art information system infrastructure, and this guarantees clients the best level of performance in business operations.
Service providers also deploy their solutions for optimum flexibility and scalability so that the systems can efficiently handle peak performance.

Access to talented workforce. By engaging the services of a managed service provider, organizations stand to benefit from talented pool of technicians who are readily available. These experts possess an accumulated knowledge of solutions that has been gained by concurrently working with several organizations.

Reduced CapEx. In a call center scenario, enterprises do not need to heavily invest in hardware devices. These equipments can be provided by a MSP through cloud technology, where the call center accesses (network based) call center applications through a standard desktop system via web browsers.

Control OpEx. Enterprises stand to benefit from the MSP cost-sharing model, a model that is structured alongside pay per agent or pay per usage.

It is against this backdrop that enterprises need to proactively understand managed IT services, because companies only stand to benefit from cost effective IT solutions at a predictable monthly cost.

You can get more information about Managed IT Services and IT Consulting Scarborough by visiting Eyes Everywhere.