What are “Managed Services”?

Managed Services are provided by a Services Company to give a customer the support they need for critical infrastructure and applications. External Managed Services are usually used for supporting areas where the customer has little in-house expertise, and for various reasons, doesn’t want these skills in-house, or to cover times where their own Support Teams are not available, e.g. over night or during holidays.

Within IT this can be for infrastructure monitoring and Break Fix, Operating Systems, Virtual Environments, VDI, storage, Security, Unified Communications, etc.

There are as many types of Managed Service as there are customers – each Customer service having some unique aspect. Below I have detailed a few of the ‘building blocks’ of Managed Services, to give you a flavour of the options available.

Managed Services at its most basic is monitoring – if a device ‘goes down’ or stops ‘talking’ then the Managed Service Provider (MSP) will take action. Sending an email to the customer to inform them of the issue; this is the most basic form of service offered. However informing the customer of the issue when the Alert is received, informing them of rectification steps that will be taken and then informing the customer of service being resumed; followed by an Incident Report is a more comprehensive Service. Important considerations when choosing a Managed Service Provider and the Service level needed!

Maturing, the Managed Service can involve handling issues not just to fix and close a ticket, but also moving into the ITIL Problem Resolution arena – this is where the MSP not only follows up with a Root Cause Analysis (RCA), but collates the data on the issues to identify ‘patterns’ which can lead to identification of an underlying issue that needs to be rectified to avoid future issues.

Another Service an MSP can provide is based around Business As Usual (BAU); Moves, Adds, Changes and Deletes (MACD). Where the management of the service is totally with the MSP. Any user requests are dealt with, all support issues and Problems.

Additionally the MSP can manage all upgrades, licencing and hardware support – with the added benefit of working with the customer to provide a Technical Road Map to ensure the technology fulfills the Business Demand, on an ongoing basis, following the Business Plan.

Working closely with your MSP to work out the type of Managed Service needed is vital to success. Even if it’s a pick and mix of the options available. Sharing business goals, plans and aspirations will go a long way to ensuring the success of the Service and the relationship.

There is an awful lot more to Managed Services than I have detailed above - if you want to know more, just ask :o)

Good luck,

John