Managed Service Provider Blog Articles and Best Practices

With more people than ever working from home, their ability to receive the support they need to keep their devices in top working order is crucial. As a result, many businesses have turned to managed IT service providers to maintain their employees’ computers. MSPs like us utilize a tool called remote monitoring and management software (RMM). Let’s discuss what it is and why it is so useful for managing your company’s IT. 

Consider the following scenario from the perspective of one of your employees:

You’re working from home, trying to get your tasks done for the day. There’s still plenty to do on your schedule, and you’re swiftly approaching deadlines for many of your responsibilities. Suddenly, your trusty laptop starts crashing, and try as you might, you can’t seem to get anything working.

So, what do you do?

This is obviously a challenging situation on numerous levels. Not only are you unable to get any work done, you’re also isolated away from whatever support resources are usually present in the office. As a result, any issues you may encounter are made much more challenging to resolve.

However, this fortunately doesn’t have to be the case.

By working with a managed service provider like MSPNetworks, you can benefit from the improvements that modern solutions can provide to the IT support process. Rather than encountering a problem and waiting around for it to be fixed, you can continue working, confident that the MSP has any challenges handled.

Using the technology at our disposal, we can remotely keep track of your computers, even while your workforce is working remotely. Should an issue arise, our team of trained IT professionals will detect it and do everything within their considerable abilities to mitigate it. Often, we can have the issue sorted before you even realize that one was present, all thanks to our use of remote monitoring and management software.

Of course, to leave the benefits at that would be to sell an MSP short. In actuality, the nature of remote monitoring and management can provide a much wider range of benefits, such as:

• Low-profile RMM solutions can be configured ahead of time and installed in the background, doing even more to preserve productivity. Once installed, our software can help protect the data of both your clients and your employees by ensuring that critical patches are professionally installed, and that a technician is always just a few clicks away.
• The management portion of our software can be used to attend to assorted support matters beyond troubleshooting, enabling us to install and manage the software that your users will need, such as VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol telephony), productivity solutions, and other business-essential tools.

At MSPNetworks, we can assist you with all of your IT needs, regardless of where your employees are currently stationed, enabling your team to accomplish more during a time that would once have made work impossible. To learn more about our services, give us a call at (516) 403-9001.

It is important that you have a handle on the technology that your business utilizes, which will require you to maintain comprehensive documentation regarding it and its support. Here, we’ll go through what a managed service provider includes in this documentation, as well as how it is used.

What Does This Documentation Include?

In short, everything there is to know about every piece of technology you rely upon to function. This can easily be divided between your hardware and software resources:

Hardware

This documentation covers all the information about the physical devices you use.

Serial/Model Numbers — This allows for simple identification of the technology that needs support, as well as the kind of device it is for your support team’s benefit.

Purchase Dates — Knowing when a piece of hardware was acquired can help you to make decisions when weighing the cost benefits of repairing or replacing it if something were to go wrong.

Warranty Information — Knowing whether a piece of equipment is still under warranty can also help the above decision-making process. After all, why buy something new if you can get it replaced or repaired for free?

Installation Dates — Again, like the purchase date of a piece of hardware, knowing when it was installed can help with the troubleshooting process if it were to need support.

Physical Locations — Knowing where a piece of IT is located not only helps your support team to service it more easily, it enables you to keep better track of where your assets are.

Device Names — Standardized technology deployments can make it challenging to confirm if the right device is in the right spot. Naming the device helps to differentiate it from the others just like it.

IP Addresses — Much like it helps you to know the physical location of each device, knowing the IP address simply helps you to identify a device on your network.

Support Information — Finally, keeping your hardware documented makes it easier to locate the appropriate support information, should it ever be needed.

Software

Meanwhile, this documentation covers all the critical information about the software you possess.

Product Licenses — This is effectively the same as the serial number on a hardware solution. This tells you the individual identification number of the copy (or copies) of the software you are able to use.

Purchase Dates — Again, knowing when you acquired something is an invaluable data point concerning its support, as it helps define if your solution is under warranty and other important variables.

Install Dates — Similarly, knowing when a software solution was installed can provide a variety of important information, particularly involving any weaknesses in its programming.

Subscription Details — Or, in other words, how many of a software’s capabilities are you able to use, and for how long? This is vital to know if you want to keep these tools available to your users.

Usernames — Speaking of your users, you need to define who can access each software title with their username. This will help you keep track of each user’s capabilities and permissions.

Version History — Finally, keeping track of the current version of each of your software will allow you to know if an update is called for, or if there are any vulnerabilities that you need to be concerned about.

Of course, you should also maintain documentation on the proper procedures to maintain all these solutions, as well.

What is the Benefit of All This Documentation?

With the help of a managed service provider like MSPNetworks, these in-depth records immediately become worth the effort. In addition to simply keeping this documentation up-to-date, an MSP will also refer to it as a resource.

Let’s assume that one of your hardware solutions begins acting up. It doesn’t really matter which, as the MSP working with you has up-to-date records of all of them. So, as your desktop/router/server is acting up, the MSP not only has a historical record to help them shape their approach, they have additional data to help guide their decision.

For instance, if this piece of technology has required you to spend excessive time on it over a given timeframe, you will have that data tucked away in your documentation. As a result, the next time an issue arises, you will be able to determine if it is more economical to replace said technology than it would be to continue repairing it.

In many ways, documentation simply serves as a better alternative to relying on memory.

If you’re interested in learning more about how working with MSPNetworks can benefit your business processes through improved documentation and so many other means, give our team a call at (516) 403-9001! 

For a moment, I want you to stop and consider something: Who do you turn to when your business’ toilets suddenly stop working? Who do you call for when the lights stop working? Most likely, an expert… so if you turn to the pros for these needs, why would you do anything different for your IT?

Here, we’ll present the value of turning to the IT experts that we have here at MSPNetworks for your business’ technology needs. These values can effectively be broken down into three essential qualities that our services - known as managed services - are built around.

Predictable Productivity

Regardless of a business’ size, this is a primary concern: are they able to sustain their operations at a rate that means that they can remain open? This is one of the reasons that productivity is such a big buzzword in IT - the influence a given solution can have on a business’ productivity can easily make or break it over time. Try asking your employees how much they can accomplish if their computers don’t work - they’ll probably tell you how important an operational solution is to your business in no uncertain terms.

With a managed service provider (or MSP) like MSPNetworks managing your solutions, you can be sure that your technology is maintained. This way, your employees won’t find themselves stymied by technical issues out of their control.

Protection

Let’s face facts for a moment - business owners today have a lot to worry about. Once upon a time, a business could be protected by storing their documents in a safe and keeping the combination a secret. However, in today’s increasingly collaborative world, the safe has been made impractical. This means that your data needs to be both accessible to those who need it to meet the productivity standards we discussed above, as well as secured against cyberthreats and other risk factors, like data loss.

An MSP like MSPNetworks can implement the various solutions needed to ensure that this balance is achieved, allowing you the security to focus on your business. With the confidence that our services and solutions--including integrated security measures and business continuity with backups--can provide, you can breathe easy, knowing that your data stores are secure.

Professionals Pulling For You

As you may have noticed by now, most of the qualities of an MSP’s services that we’ve discussed thus far revolve around you receiving the managed support that gives providers like MSPNetworks their self-explanatory title. However, that only scratches the service. When your MSP’s team is made up of experts like ours is, you not only have professionals providing your business with support… you have professionals supporting you.

Unlike many other IT service options, the more successful our clients are, the happier we are. After all, that means that our solutions worked for them, only reinforcing the proof that our options are the right ones to leverage. Furthermore, you can be sure that if you do experience a problem with your business technology we’ll come correct to fix it. Again, our success is determined by yours - so if something doesn’t work, that’s a problem for us… and frankly, our professional egos aren’t going to let us overlook a problem like that.

It only makes sense to turn to an expert for issues that you want taken care of correctly, for these reasons, and many more to boot. This is only more apparent when your information technology is involved. The “expert touch” is a real thing, and can make a real difference.

Interested in finding out the difference that an expert touch can make for your IT services? Reach out to us at (516) 403-9001.