Higher States Of Operational Efficiency - Seeking Utopia

By Steve Ricketts, VP of marketing, Continuum

Competitive pressures and rapid technology changes are driving managed service providers (MSPs) to seek greater efficiencies in IT service delivery to their small and medium-sized business (SMBs) customers. In fact, increasing operational efficiency is not only the number one challenge cited by IT resellers, but also the most difficult to achieve when adopting managed services, according to a recent CompTIA survey.

There are multiple dimensions to operational efficiency. For some IT firms newer to the managed services model, simply moving beyond “break/fix” and leveraging remote monitoring and management (RMM) software can produce immediate productivity gains. Indeed the ability to automate routine tasks can go a long way toward reducing onsite calls and coping with the daunting task of monitoring hundreds of server alerts.

However, the advantages offered by RMM software also present new challenges and responsibilities that stretch an MSP’s time and resources such as:

• Keeping servers, software and infrastructure consistently up and running and ensuring support staff is available 24/7
• Analyzing server alerts and identifying steps to resolution
• Performing remote maintenance on desktops and servers; deploying patches and antivirus updates is only part of the task as testing, troubleshooting failed patches goes beyond the capabilities of a software application
• Providing onsite data backup and offsite replication for disaster recovery

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