How hosted monitoring enables MSPs to seamlessly deliver services to their clients

Considering technology’s vital role in today’s business landscape, keeping IT systems running smoothly is essential to every business’s success. However, not all companies have the resources or budget to have their own IT department. Fortunately, this is where Managed Services Providers (MSPs) come in, as they specialise in managing their clients’ technology needs.

An MSP delivers services, such as network, application, infrastructure and security, via ongoing and regular support and active administration on a customer’s premises, in their own data centre, or via a third-party data centre.

The mammoth shift in IT service delivery has transformed the entire IT services industry, meaning that IT strategies have moved from reactive to proactive for most organisations. Instead of waiting for problems to occur, MSPs work hard on behalf of their clients to avoid them happening. Collaborating with an MSP has become vital for all organisations to ensure the quality and reliability of their IT systems, allowing them to focus on running their businesses.

Efficient and effective delivery of IT support services is central to the success of MSPs. For them, customer satisfaction is crucial, so there is certainly no room for unavailable or non-functioning client networks.

Ensuring seamless delivery of IT services

Clients of MSPs always expect efficient service delivery, but there may be periods when a system could go down due to scheduled or unscheduled maintenance. Any unplanned downtime could significantly interrupt a client’s business operations. Data loss, software crashes, or hardware issues can cause inconvenience to customers and their employees, partners and suppliers.

MSPs have multiple clients and require high network availability for every single one 24/7. Without a unified infrastructure monitoring solution in place, the challenge of having everything up and running with multiple customer networks to manage and potentially hundreds or thousands of different network hosts is endless.

MSPs need a comprehensive hosted monitoring tool that keeps track of the health of every aspect of a client’s network and IT environment, including firewalls, switches, servers, applications and even virtual, cloud and hybrid environments.

Proactive IT support

The challenge is that the mammoth task of infrastructure monitoring has to be easy for MSPs so that it automatically alerts them as soon as an issue arises. They can take corrective action before a crisis results in avoidable downtime.

When successfully unified, a hosted monitoring platform can provide relevant, real-time data and actions directly to the appropriate technicians to resolve any issues quickly before they become problematic.

One of the key benefits of a hosted monitoring system is that it enables IT support staff to work much faster through consolidated device analytics and alert activity to immediately take informed action.

Service Level Agreements

The risk of not taking immediate action is that there will always be a Service Level Agreement (SLA) in place with every client and failure to meet the targets set can be costly for an MSP.

An SLA is designed to make the MSP successful while allowing the customer to hold the MSP accountable when things go wrong. This agreement sets a customer’s expectations about what is required of the MSP and what is not.

When the required performance levels set out in the SLA are not met, the customer can seek compensation or terminate the contract of the MSP early. This is why the MSP and its clients need to have unified monitoring in place, for either party to prove that an SLA has been breached.

Proactive monitoring keeps customers satisfied

The role of the MSP is to monitor multiple complex IT systems and resolve issues before they become huge and costly problems for their clients.

Firstly, proactive hardware and software monitoring can help extend their lifecycle, negating the need to buy replacements frequently or pay for repair costs. Secondly, this enables businesses to avoid unnecessary downtime, which can lead to monetary losses and reputational damage.

Technology has become a crucial driver for the operational efficiency of all businesses. However, it can be expensive for them to install and maintain themselves. Therefore, adopting a proactive strategy to reduce downtime while protecting customer data is vital. Getting proactive IT support from an experienced MSP with a hosted monitoring service in place could be a good start.

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