If you’ve been looking into IT support in Nashville for your small business you may have come across the term Managed Services Provider or MSP. Chances are, if you are looking for IT services, you may not be familiar with an MSP, or what they are about.
A managed services provider like CloudSmart IT is simply an outsourced IT department. We provide IT services as if you had your own tech people on staff. The advantage of engaging a managed services provider is that we are on hand when you need us, without the added cost of employing an in-house IT team. You don’t have to worry about costly salaries, benefits and managing nerds – we do all of that for you!
We have packages that you can pick from depending on what your needs are and we keep it simple to understand, by charging based on the number of users your business has, not the number of computers or how many servers or by what applications you are running. We also help you be more efficient – if you have 10 employees and you’re running 10 servers then we need to talk, because that just isn’t right!
If you currently pay for IT support by the hour, for service that we call “you call we haul”, those days are gone. There are a few people out there still hanging on to this methodology, trust me we go back and forth on Facebook about how they think MSP’s like CloudSmart IT are robbing small business like yours. The thing is they don’t understand the value that an MSP brings to the table because they are missing the whole picture.
With an MSP you’re getting hardware, security software, ongoing maintenance and support, a help desk for your employees, IT training, office 365 licensing, dark web monitoring, email security including encryption, operating procedures and IT best practices. What do you get from “We call you haul” guy”? An hourly bill. Honestly, they are doing you a disservice and giving MSP’s like CloudSmart IT a bad name in the tech business.
Not all MSPs are created equal. In the business we call the suite of vendors that make up software and hardware to provide our managed it services a “stack”. The stack is made up of the backup, security, monitoring software along with hardware like a firewall, network switch, wireless provided under our packages such as Managed Network services. I would be crazy to give up our complete stack, as that is part of what makes up our secret sauce that you need to run your business more efficiently and securely.
Rest assured though, that when you work with a managed services provider like CloudSmart IT you are receiving a proactive service, rather than a reactive one. We work with you to develop the best system for your business needs, protecting you against online nasties, creating efficiencies in your workflow, and supporting your team in implementing a solid IT plan. A by the hour service is usually focused on fixing problems after they occur and let’s face it, this is not only costing you more financially, it’s also costing you inefficiency and lack of productivity.
Still susceptible and don’t want to hire a Managed Services Provider? No worries, we get it sometimes things have to catch on fire or break, or even worse be hacked by China or Russia before you’re ready to sign up. I sure hope that doesn’t happen to you. Book a call with me and let us get to know your wants and desires for your business and your employees so we can help your business grow and be successful. In the end that is what we are all striving for right?