06 June 2024

Managed services are high on the agenda for IT teams – but how can organisations make the best choice for their specific circumstances?

A managed service can make or break an enterprise, and with significant variation in what constitutes the managed portion of the services between different managed service providers (MSPs), it can be a challenging prospect to identify what’s best for business…

Separating the wheat from the chaff
Selecting a MSP is no mean feat – after all, the success of the enterprise is at stake.

“Enterprises need to select an MSP that can demonstrate that the services being deployed are doing what they say they will on the tin,” says Martin Hodgson, director Northern Europe, Paessler. “In 2024, business leaders are more discerning than ever when investing into any area of the organisation – whether that be IT, marketing, or even talent. Customers want to know that any service they invest into is one that is going to demonstrate good ROI and be performant.”

“Organisations should seek a provider who has experience, knowledge and understanding of the technology they need to look after and can deal with any problems,” adds Martin Saunders, COO, Highlight. “They should also have economies of scale with greater purchasing power, use equipment more efficiently as well as having the breadth of staff to deliver 24/7 coverage.”

To ensure the provider supports specific business objectives effectively, the organisation must consider several salient points, including the range and customisation options of services and capabilities; compatibility with existing infrastructure; specific industry experience and qualifications; security measures and industry compliance; scalability and flexibility; onboarding and support; SLAs and accountability; and, of course, cost and value.
Overall, a holistic approach is recommended.

“Rather than focus on the terms of a managed service, an enterprise should look for a provider that can act as a virtual member of their IT team with the overall aim of improving the customer experience,” asserts Saunders. “Discussions should focus on what the provider will be doing, who they will work with, what information they will provide and what elements they can take off the enterprise IT team. If discussions focus on basic uptime SLAs, it will miss the point.”

“Cost is a factor in any business investment, but simply comparing monthly invoice numbers will ignore some important points,” says Jordan MacPherson, director, product operations, Entuity. “The right MSP will have expertise in the technologies that matter to your business and have enough resources to support you beyond the ideal steady state we all dream of. Another important consideration would be scale of the engineering teams. Do they have the resources to support you at the most critical times?”

Considering these factors will help an enterprise choose an MSP that not only meets its immediate needs but also supports long-term business goals and growth. When it comes to separating the wheat from the chaff, Saunders says that the provider must supply the visibility to demonstrate how they will manage the proposed solution and then communicate the successful delivery.

“If a provider can include a Service Observability Platform as part of their managed service package, then the customer is more likely to have a strong working relationship with their service provider for the long term,” says Saunders.

MacPherson reports that the decision should be based upon thorough procurement process, but the answer to this one question - “Do I trust them?” – must be a resounding ‘yes.’

Meanwhile, Hodgson recommends asking prospective new providers: “what steps are you, as a service provider, going to take to deliver an exceptional service? How will you prove that you are meeting those deliverables?”

Happy enterprise, happy customers
Fostering a good working relationship between organisation and MSP relies upon clear communication, mutual trust, defined expectations and goals, regularly reviewed SLAs, accountability, and continual improvement.

“The relationship between an IT organisation and provider depends upon a virtuous circle of open collaboration between organisations,” says MacPherson, director, product operations, Entuity. “Success of the engagement and be driven by a thorough understanding of the technical, commercial and business strategies of the organisations it partners with. The MSP should appreciate the unique nature of each of our customers’ businesses and requirements, with services designed to provide flexibility, and understand and organisation’s technical, commercial and business strategies through a dedicated and highly skilled team that delivers services on time, to scope and in budget.”

“Rather than focus on the terms of a managed service, an enterprise should look for a provider that can act as a virtual member of their IT team with the overall aim of improving the customer experience.”

“Customers want their providers to act in a competent, reliable, and honest way. If they cannot trust their provider in any of these three areas, they will simply change to another,” surmises Saunders. “The customer’s perception of how well their provider can meet these criteria is often dependant on the quality and transparency of the information they provide.”

“To ensure a good relationship between an enterprise and a service provider, you need to set realistic expectations and then deliver against them. If customers are at the heart of everything we do, it makes sense to structure monitoring systems around them,” adds Hodgson.

SLAs are one way to keep the service provider accountable, reports Hodgson: “if your organisation strives to deliver a very high uptime of the devices used in your offering, then the service level objective is set to 99.999%. This being said, it’s important that there’s still some flexibility in the relationship between the enterprise and service provider if the relationship is going to be mutually beneficial. 100% availability isn’t always possible due to maintenance and outages. But there is a world of difference between an unplanned outage, and one that is mutually scheduled to benefit both parties. The key to happy customers is keeping them informed about planned outages in advance.”

Moreover, having a shared understanding of how network and application services are performing will encourage productive communication between the service provider, the enterprise’s network management staff and end-users at all levels.

“A good relationship between the organisation and its service provider should always be rooted in high levels of transparency. This enables IT teams to be highly reactive when it comes to issues that affect network performance.”

“With users on both sides of the relationship able to understand how systems are performing, they will be able to easily identify potential problems, reducing the need for escalation and leading to a longer-term association,” explains Saunders.

The effort is well worth the result, with good enterprise-provider relationships delivering numerous benefits for network performance and organisational efficiency.

“In a managed service scenario, the provider takes responsibility for a particular area of the network with, for example, a service manager turning up to monthly meetings to fight the corner of the network,” says Saunders. “With a strong and effective relationship, the enterprise IT team will be free to deal more with their users and the application side of things whilst the service provider manages the infrastructure underneath. Ultimately, this will enable the organisation to focus on being more efficient, sustainable, competitive, and profitable.”

Indeed, quantifiable benefits of the healthy relationship include enhanced network reliability and uptime as a result of proactive monitoring and fast response; improved network performance with optimal resource allocation and regular updates; enhanced security via proactive measures and rapid incident response; and optimised, predictable costs. Additional benefits include a better user experience with consistent performance, and data-driven decision making aided by insightful reporting.

“A good relationship between the organisation and its service provider should always be rooted in high levels of transparency. This enables IT teams to be highly reactive when it comes to issues that affect network performance,” outlines Hodgson. “Much like a doctor on call, who is able to respond at speed when provided with clear locations and directions to a given incident, effective communication and collaboration speeds up the digital ‘diagnosis’ process.”

From good to great
Once the enterprise has selected the right MSP, and cultivated a healthy relationship – how do they know whether they’re getting the best service they possibly can?

“Like a business leader that delivers on key performance indicators (KPIs) to clients, SLAs enable MSPs to clearly communicate to their customers how service standards are being upheld,” says Hodgson. “Therefore, a great managed service will be one that exceeds the expectations of the customers/users. Whilst it’s good to thrill, it is always vital to ensure consistency. Once you’ve delivered exceptional performance, you’ve set the bar higher in terms of expectation, so need to have a strategy in place to deliver on the uptime levels promised.”

While transparency is important, it is not good enough to blast information at customers, says Saunders. A provider needs to know if anyone is looking at the information and that it makes sense, which means communicating in an intelligible way and ensuring the information is valued.

“A great managed service is therefore one where both provider and customer have a shared view of how all services are performing, with the provider able to show that they are competent and delivering a reliable and trustworthy service that matches what they have promised,” opines Saunders.

Hodgson agrees that the best managed services will be able to provide admins and users with clear visualisations of their IT environments: “sharing dashboards with users, which can be defined based on different objectives, sites, or vendors, is highly effective. These simple digital pictures, where green indicates ‘performant’ and red indicates ‘requires resolution’ speak a thousand words. Nobody needs to be trained to understand a traffic light!”

In-house tools
Every enterprise should fully examine whether a managed network is right for them, or whether house-owned optimisation tools and teams also have their place.
Indeed, Hodgson calls for every organisation to consider leveraging tools that provide an understanding of the performance and availability of their networks, no matter their size: this is even more vital if the provision of communications usually occurs via a third party.

“Any organisation that relies on one or more service providers to deliver their networks will benefit from having an in-house tool that gives them observability of the services they receive and then deliver to their users,” concurs Saunders. “Ideally, in house teams should have access to a location and service-centric view of their network data presented in a standardised way, that is both understandable and comparable, to ensure they can deliver more uniform support to all their users.”

Hodgson explains that smaller enterprises with modest budgets and infrastructure must ensure maximum ROI from resources, despite tighter financial constraints, by considering tools that offer a broader, non-vendor specific set of capabilities.

“For organisations with more complex environments, IT teams may benefit from tools that offer increased ‘noise cancelling’ capabilities. Such tools can help in reducing mean time to resolution (MTTR), ensuring that system alerts related to root causes do not leave admins swimming in a sea of notifications,” adds Hodgson.
With access to persistent network data, IT and network managers will be far better equipped to pinpoint the source of problems immediately.

“Look for tools that will capture the Digital Experience, utilising persistent performance metrics and native SLA scoring (including maintenance windows and exceptions) for both individual connections and grouped services. IT and network managers can then hold their service providers to account and reclaim credits where required,” says Hodgson. “IT and network managers should also seek a flexible alerting suite with customisable sensitivity to ensure that problems are flagged long before they become outages, with alerts integrated with support ticketing platforms. Look for a tool that will identify broadband speeds, SD-WAN performance, WiFi AP utilisation and analyse trends alongside a reporting engine that will take all the guesswork out of capacity planning.”

Even with an excellent MSP in hand, in-house tools deliver unmistakable benefits for the enterprise – and thus should not be overlooked during cost-cutting exercises.