One of my favorite clients has been in business for almost 30 years. When he first started his business, personal computers were still firmly relegated to hobbyists and computer science whizzes at MIT and elsewhere. It would be an understatement to say that the computing revolution has changed the way this client has conducted his business, and despite the fact that he had some challenges transiting to personal computers in the 90s and 00s, ultimately he was able to use personal computers to make his business far more productive.

While cloud and managed services have become increasingly powerful IT solutions for businesses like his, this client was skeptical to – as he put it – “unlearn” the benefits of having computers and his IT infrastructure on-site by transitioning to managed services that are hosted off-site.

Partially in response to this conversation, but also as a service to my other clients (and those who are still on the fence about the benefits of managed services), I have put together a list of just four of the ways that managed services can make your company more productive, which of course translates to larger profit margins.

If you’ve never had a security breach at your company, consider yourself lucky. According to a recent study, close to half of all businesses have had a security breach of some kind in the past year. Not only can security breaches cause a loss of company data (and customer trust), but they can result in hours, days, or even weeks of downtime, during which your company is producing significantly less than it otherwise would.

One of the biggest differences between managed services and more traditional IT setups stems from the fact that managed services are proactively monitored. This means that any potential problems, including everything from disk errors to viruses, are detected and dealt with automatically. This is significantly more efficient, and results in substantially less downtime, than a more traditional philosophy of waiting for an IT component to fail before scrambling to get it fixed.

Managed services also mean that all of your essential information is backed up. With a basic data backup, you might typically lose peripheral information, such as emails and other collaboration and correspondence within your company that was not specifically backed up on your servers.

With a suite of managed services, ALL of your company information, including emails, are backed up. In practice, this means that an otherwise “catastrophic” loss of data will be a relatively minor hiccup that takes your company out of regular operations for a day or (much) less.

While there is no question that email continues to be an essential tool for collaboration and communication, the fact of the matter is that it is still woefully inefficient, particularly when compared to collaborative tools that are available through managed services.

Perhaps the most significant productivity benefit from managed services is the ability to scale up (or down) your company’s IT infrastructure without the typical lead time needed to upgrade, purchase, and install existing servers on-site. Instead, you can simply request increased capacity and/or services from your managed services provider, who can then give you access to their spare capacity in near real-time. Even if you are using your own set of on-site servers, having access to servers from a managed service provider will mean at the very least that you have the option of either adding to your on-site infrastructure or simply utilizing your managed service provider’s infrastructure.

The bottom line is that managed services help ensure that your IT assets are working at as close to peak effectiveness as possible. As every business owner knows, every hour spent not working is money down the drain. Managed services help to keep those hours to a minimum.

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For more information about managed services in Los Angeles, California, or for general questions about cloud migration, including how a managed service provider can ensure a seamless transition to an Office365 environment, please take a look at our website by visiting us at https://www.lastlinesolutions.com or call us at (310) 286-0111

Laurent Slutzky is the founder of Last Line Solutions Inc., a full service Managed Service Provider