Technology Success with an IT Support Leaders Managed Services
In today’s competitive business landscape, a robust, efficient, and compliant IT infrastructure is no longer a luxury—it’s a necessity. However, navigating the complexities of IT management, ranging from staff retention to regulatory compliance, can often feel like an uphill battle. This is where IT Managed Service Providers (MSPs) like IT Support Leaders come into play.
In this blog post, we delve into the myriad advantages of partnering with an IT MSP for both fully managed services and in a co-managed IT relationship. We’ll explore how our wealth of IT management expertise, backed by advanced tools and continuous training, can transform your IT operations. From driving network availability, standardizing processes in alignment with best practices, to enhancing scalability, competitiveness, and profitability, the benefits are far-reaching.
One critical area we’ll focus on is our support for compliance with major regulatory frameworks, such as HIPAA, FTC, NIST, and Cyber Insurance, among others. We prioritize keeping your business on the right side of regulations, managing your compliance documentation and evidence meticulously.
So, whether you’re a small business wrestling with a growing IT environment, or an established corporation looking to optimize IT operations, this post will illuminate how an IT MSP partnership can catalyze your success. Let’s dive in.
What is an IT MSP:
IT MSP stands for Information Technology Managed Service Provider. As an MSP, IT SUPPORT LEADERS acts as or augments your internal IT department and virtual CIO/CTO/CISO. We are constantly monitoring, managing, and maintaining the network so that you can focus on your business.
MSP service is different from the old model of break/fix or call-me-when-you-need-me (when things blow up) type of IT service. Businesses using the break/fix service are not being proactive and avoiding issues. Instead, they wait until problems pile up or cause downtime before calling their IT company. Once they do call, they end up in a bad situation expecting immediate service and get hit with a large IT bill. This is a lose/lose situation for the business and the IT company. An MSP Agreement creates a win/win situation where it is in the best interest of the business and the IT service company that the business network runs smoothly and securely.
IT SUPPORT LEADERS MSP Advantages:
With IT SUPPORT LEADERS’s IT MSP Service Clients can:
- Focus on Core Objectives – worry about business and getting more of it.
- Gain Valuable Expertise and Experience – gain access to experts and specialists that work with and are exposed to many business models of all sizes and variations.
- Keep Costs Low and More Predictable – better budgeting for Operating Expenses.
- Scale Easily – by standardizing systems and practices and not worrying about IT staffing.
- Offload hiring, onboarding, training, and replacing IT staff.
- Get Support 24x7x365 – technicians available when you need them.
- Avoid Downtime – proactive maintenance, monitoring, and patching keeps things working.
- Gain a Reliable Point of Contact and extra resources when you need them.
IT MSP and/or In-house IT Department:
Whether you do or do not have an internal IT department or resources, a Managed Service Provider can help. Some companies prefer to outsource the entire IT department function, while others want their internal IT department to focus on projects and initiatives that make the business more efficient, competitive, and profitable.
Co-Managed IT Support:
In this scenario, IT Support Leaders can help your IT department fill the gaps by providing:
- Expertise in a particular area,
- If you need expertise with a particular technology like Virtualization, Cloud Migration, Office365, Telephony Integration, IT management, and more.
- Gap analysis of Best Practice vs Actual Practice.
- Security Risk and Vulnerability Assessments, Standards Assessments,
- NIST Cybersecurity Framework Assessment and Action Plan.
- HIPAA Compliance Program and Documented Evidence of Compliance Efforts.
- Project assistance,
- If you need help organizing, managing, and implementing a new project, moving, or deploying a new location, department, or solution.
- IT Staff augmentation,
- Seasonal businesses that need help during peak seasons or help in a particular area.
- Businesses that do not want the headaches of hiring, onboarding, and training IT staff.
- Projects: ITSL can help with specific projects lending expertise and resources.
- Monitoring, Alerting, Maintenance, Patching, & Remediations,
- Let us handle the more routine functions, after-hours functions, security patching, firmware updates, etc. providing excellent reports on everything being done.
- Advanced Reporting & Documentation including Regulatory Compliance
- Network Health, Inventory & Warranty Management, Vendor Management, Compliance Effort Evidence, Policy & Procedure development, and more.
- Good documentation speeds up processes, remediations, transitions, and continuity.
- Network Operations Center – 24×7 monitoring, alerting, and remediations.
- Security Operations Center – 24×7 security monitoring, detection, and incident response.
Outsourced IT Support:
Running an in-house IT department is complex. First, there is the difficulty of hiring knowledgeable staff that stays up to date with technology and has a wide range of experience and knowledge. IT encompasses many different layers from networking and cybersecurity to server administration, application support, telephone systems, and much more. To have a well-rounded IT department, it usually takes at least five to seven people with different areas and levels of expertise.
Your business becomes very dependent on a few critical people and when they are out sick, on vacation, or leave to another company, it is difficult to maintain continuity, documentation, and stability. When heavy projects roll around or seasonal requirements, your MSP is ready to send extra people to help at just the right time.
Avoid the HR headaches in an increasingly difficult time to find and keep good staff. By now, you have noticed that employees jump around more often than in the past. When employees leave, whether in good faith or under more hostile or abrupt circumstances, passwords go missing, existing solutions must be deciphered and explained to the replacing employee. Suddenly, you must get much more involved in IT than you ever wanted to be causing you stress and making you lose focus from running your business.
IT SUPPORT LEADERS – The MSP Staff Advantage:
By partnering with IT SUPPORT LEADERS, you gain our commitment to keep you in charge of your documentation and passwords. We know and maintain what is important to the continuity of your business systems, under contract with a reliable, insured IT company that has been in business for 19 years and counting.
At IT SUPPORT LEADERS, our staff is continually training and exposed to many different networks, equipment manufacturers, application solutions, and more. We cross-train our employees in different technologies and work in a highly collaborative environment where everyone is aware and can add value to every task and project. Every morning, our staff discusses their activities for the day and receive input from everyone else to make sure every task takes every aspect into account.
We ensure sufficient staffing levels and deep expertise on each skillset with ongoing training and certification across many disciplines and technologies. To keep our staff happy and productive, we provide full benefits packages including discount perks, medical, dental, vision, and life insurance, retirement planning, 401k matching, training, certifications, and opportunities for growth.
IT SUPPORT LEADERS – Adding Value Every Day by:
- Gaining a solid understanding of your business and workflows:
- IT SUPPORT LEADERS works hard with your key stake holders to learn how you use technology in your operations, workflows, procedures, and special needs.
- Every business is not the same and we are not here to change your business or tell you how to run your business.
- A good IT company understands the specifics of your business and makes experienced suggestions on how to leverage the latest technologies to provide excellent customized service.
- Securing your Network
- IT SUPPORT LEADERS’s comprehensive multi-layer approach to cybersecurity helps secure your network and avoid costly cyberattacks that could cause downtime, data loss, lawsuits, and fines or penalties.
- We secure the network in the Cloud, at the edge, and internally with different systems at each layer.
- Contributing to Scalability
- IT SUPPORT LEADERS can help your business infrastructure become more scalable as you grow.
- Best Practice, Standardization, Policy & Procedure Development all contribute to the scalability of your business.
- IT SUPPORT LEADERS has invested greatly in standardizations in our own operations to make us easily scalable and able to address your growth without delays.
- Ensuring Continuity of Operations.
- We avoid issues by providing proactive maintenance.
- With a large investment in monitoring, management, and maintenance software, procedures, and scripts IT SUPPORT LEADERS can avoid many issues by ensuring all of your technology is well maintained.
- Our tools catch things that will become a problem and we get ahead of these things by performing the work.
- Backups and restores are a top priority to ensure continuity.
- IT SUPPORT LEADERS monitors backup jobs every day ensuring successful completion.
- We periodically test restoration of files to ensure backup integrity.
- IT SUPPORT LEADERS will help you devise a Continuity Plan to address potential risks with a solid recovery plan.
- Quickly resolving IT issues so that production continues.
- We respond quickly to service requests and prioritize MSP Clients.
- Maintaining Strong Documentation.
- Good documentation is worth its weight in gold.
- Ensures your issues can be resolved quickly and insightfully by multiple techs.
- Ensures no delays in providing service or overcoming staff turnover.
- Looking for ways to increase your profitability.
- Find ways to save money.
- Find better technology to make you more efficient, effective, and profitable.
- Help identify and suggest new opportunities.
- Compliance and Litigation Documentation
- When litigation or compliance reviews take place, having a ticket system to track any changes to configurations, addition and removal of users, patching history, and much more.
- IT SUPPORT LEADERS specializes in developing compliance programs to help you document all of your compliance efforts and be ready for any reviews or audits.
- User Training and Awareness
- Most cyber-attacks are successful due to employee misuse of the network.
- IT SUPPORT LEADERS trains your users keeping them aware of threats & how to stay safe.
We thank you for your time and look forward to working with you and your business.
MAIN: 305-885-2212
Frequently Asked Questions:
How quickly can we request support and when can IT SUPPORT LEADERS begin work?
You can request service for any critical or pressing issues on Day 1. You simply call our office at 305-885-2212 or send an email with your request to [email protected].
We can typically create a custom onboarding project and assign the tasks to our Team of technicians within 3 to 5 business days of signing the agreement.
How long does it take to have our devices documented, remote management, monitoring tools, and security software installed, and on the managed services plan?
This depends on many factors like the number of locations, devices, access, availability of credentials, and much more.
IT SUPPORT LEADERS has invested heavily in monitoring, deployment, maintenance tools, software, custom rules, automation scripts, and more. A lot of the work can be done remotely without interrupting your workforce. Your vCIO/CTO will be able to provide realistic expectations based on years of experience and the specifics of your environment.
Some of the work must be done on site and some of the work may have to be done after business hours. When necessary, we can put a lot of boots on the ground, but we must work around both of our schedules. By signing up as an MSP Client and making a commitment to IT SUPPORT LEADERS, we also make a commitment to staff accordingly and prioritize work requests from our MSP Clients over any Break/Fix Clients requesting new work.
We signed up with IT SUPPORT LEADERS today, is my network 100% secure now?
Almost, but not quite yet… Anyone who says “yes,” is just flat out lying. We know what to resolve first and how to prioritize the work to give you the best experience and avoid any issues.
We methodically attack the most critical issues first and begin securing the network as quickly as possible. The most important goal is your ability to continue doing business as usual (or better). Backups are one of the first things we will review to ensure restorability. Firewalls are immediately reviewed for external threat blocking and much more.
Once we have our agents installed on the network, we immediately begin patching and securing servers and workstations as well as monitoring them 24×7. Then we can further analyze the configurations and determine what, if any, changes are required to secure your network at multiple layers. These standardization recommendations are presented to you with options as to the best ways to secure everything. More involved or complex remediations may require some project work.
How involved do my employees have to be in the onboarding?
We can manage most of IT on our own, but we do need cooperation from you and your employees. Things that will slow us down are uncooperative employees or former IT, missing credentials/passwords, and working around your schedules to avoid any interruptions. We are also glad to have a meet and greet with your employees/managers or a training session where they can bring up any IT issues they need resolved and
Will our production be impacted?
We will do our best to minimize any interruptions to your employees and schedule processes after your working hours, but some things will require information and time from your employees. We will not perform any work that could take down your network during production hours. Any work that may carry a maintenance window will be brought to your attention and a suitable plan will be devised.
Lastly, here is a question for you…
How can IT SUPPORT LEADERS help bring you more business, make you more efficient and profitable?
At IT SUPPORT LEADERS, we understand that our clients’ success contributes to our success.
IT solutions evolve quickly. We stay on top of the latest solutions and are always seeking and recommending better ways of doing things. By having a technical team that is constantly training, reading technology articles, collaborating with each other, and servicing hundreds, even thousands, of businesses, over the years, you get a technical team with a tremendous, combined experience.
We can strategize with you on:
- Automation solutions to help reduce time-consuming tasks.
- Better ways to communicate with staff and clients.
- Ways to make your employees more productive and happier at work.
- Ways to improve your client’s experience and loyalty.
- How to mine data for business opportunities, and much mor
