If you are like many of our customers, you have asked the question “Why would I hire an MSP?” or you have considered hiring a managed service provider but not sure if it makes sense. Before we get into does it make sense or not, you need to know where you are at. To do that we recommend you ask yourself a few questions. Based on the answers to these questions you will have a better sense if you should consider a managed service provider. Let’s get to it!

Grab a piece of paper and write “Consider an MSP” on the top left and “Don’t consider it”.

The Questions:

1. Does your IT department have less than 10 people?
   1. Yes – Check Consider an MSP
   2. No – Check Don’t Consider an MSP

2. Does your organization have between 75 and 1500 employees?
   1. Yes – Check Consider an MSP
   2. No – Check Don’t Consider an MSP

3. Do you have an infrastructure monitoring system and a dedicated team member to manage it?
   1. Yes – Check Don’t Consider an MSP
   2. No – Check Consider an MSP

4. Do you have a network configuration management system to track configurations and changes?
   1. Yes – Check Don’t Consider an MSP
   2. No – Check Consider an MSP

5. If you outsourced a portion of your environment would that free up a resource to focus on more valuable task to benefit the organization?
   1. Yes – Check Consider an MSP
   2. No – Check Don’t Consider an MSP

OK, now that you answered those questions you have a better idea if it makes sense to have further discussions. If it does keep reading, we will discuss the benefits, the costs, and what the next step is.

The Benefits

Focus – Managed service providers focus on running IT infrastructure effectively and efficiently. We are efficient because an MSP has many customers with the same or similar infrastructure components. This means the service provider can monitor, manage, and track changes the same way across all of their customers.

Tools – MSP’s have a set of tools they use to manage the infrastructure. By hiring a managed service provider, you will get the benefit of those tools. Not only the tools but all of the work and experience put into the toolset to make it work. If you have ever deployed a network monitoring tool, you know the amount of work it takes.

Dedicated Resources – Managed Service Providers have dedicated resources to each area of delivery, Reactive Support, Proactive Engineering, Alert and Incident Response, Life Cycle Management.

Time – By leveraging an MSP your team gets back time, essentially you are getting rid of the network chores and having a company do it for you. This provides you leverage to drive critical projects that enable your business to be more successful.

The Cost

Every managed service provider has different pricing structures, but this can give you a relative idea to what we charge and how we structure our agreements.

What’s Included – We take on the management, of the infrastructure from a run and maintain perspective. We provide a monitoring tool, service request tracking system, a configuration  management system, an asset tracking system to aid in infrastructure lifecycle management, Infrastructure utilization reporting, and a dedicated architect to evaluate architecture and best practice configurations.

Fixed Fee – We charge our clients a fixed fee amount each month with a set contract duration. The contract covers what is covered and not covered. Our managed service offerings are focused on IT infrastructure, so that is Collaboration (Voice, Video, and Contact Center), Networking (LAN, WAN, Wireless, SD-WAN), Data Center (VMware, Storage, Compute).

The Cost – Our costs have three components onboarding fee, base cost, per device cost.

• Onboarding – Onboarding is a one-time fee which covers the initial assessment of your infrastructure and configuration of the infrastructure monitoring. It also includes the cost of our monitoring appliance which we place onsite.
• Base Cost – The base cost is a monthly fee that covers all of the hard costs associated to supporting a customer. This covers the dedicated architect, service coordination, standard tool set, reporting services, and customer reviews.
• Device Cost – The device cost is a monthly fee that is charged per device or application based on what we support

Now that we covered the breakdown of how we price our agreements, lets get to the number.

• One-time onboarding cost: $5,000
• Annual Infrastructure managed service Cost: $48,000 - $80,000

If you are interested in Infrastructure managed service, we would love to help! Contact us.

Written By: Sean Barr, LookingPoint CEO