The world is focusing more and more on technology all the time. In turn, the demand for services that used to be relatively new is increasing at an equally rapid pace. Such is the case of managed services.
These days, the managed services market is worth more than $150 billion per year. In fact, projections show that the managed services sector will be worth more than $274 billion by 2026! All of that growth means that choosing managed service providers will be even more difficult in the years to come.
With so many different managed service providers to select from, how can you know if you are picking the right one? Each business has a different set of circumstances, but some rules apply no matter what those circumstances may be.
Read on to learn all about the most important things to keep in mind when choosing managed service providers.
Find a Provider Familiar With Your Common IT Problems
Every part of the world has different common IT problems. Therefore, when you are picking a managed service provider, you might consider a local option. The more local your choice is, the more likely they are to be familiar with the most common IT problems in your area.
Of course, an IT managed service provider that is located far away may also be able to do a perfectly good job. However, the farther away they are, the more you might need to do a little digging to confirm that they have a lot of experience with your particular kind of IT problems.
At the end of the day, there is a big difference between the best managed service provider company in the world and the best managed service provider company for you in particular.
Find a Provider That Works With Your Managed Service Budget
In all aspects of business, you get what you pay for. Oftentimes, that can make it necessary to increase your budget to make sure that you get quality.
At the same time, you have to weigh your managed service provider budget against your budget for everything else. Allocating more money to IT managed services necessarily means giving less money to other things.
There are so many managed service providers to choose between. That means that you need to keep in mind techniques for sorting quickly between them. One of the fastest sorting procedures is to remove any managed service provider that is outside of your budget.
To do that, it is important to sit down and decide what your budget is. It is often helpful to have an ideal cost in mind. It is also helpful to have the absolute highest cost in mind.
Any company that charges more than your absolute highest acceptable cost can quickly be sorted out.
The More Managed IT Experience, the Better
In general, the more experience a company has, the better. This applies to practically every industry. However, there are a few nuances about experience that you need to keep in mind.
Not all experience is created equal. In fact, some types of experience may even be irrelevant to you.
For example, if a company has an incredible amount of experience managing outsourced data storage, that is only relevant to businesses that require special attention to outsourced data storage. If you are not interested in outsourcing your data storage, then it doesn’t matter that they have a lot of experience in that area.
Sit down and think about what the most important things are for you to have in a managed service provider. You will want to find a provider with lots of experience in those areas.
When you talk to a prospective provider, ask them what areas they have the most experience in. It is often best for you not to mention what you hope their answer will be. That way, if they tell you what you want to hear, you will know it is because it is true, not because they are simply telling you that they have experience in whatever areas you hope they have experience in.
Check Out References and Reviews
How likely is a managed service provider to give you what you are looking for? One of the best ways to answer that is to see how they have performed in the past. If they have given past customers what they were looking for, then they’re likely to do the same for you.
Today, it is easy to find huge quantities of reviews from past customers. That makes it a lot easier to choose between providers than it used to be.
On top of that, you can use ratings to decide which companies are worth investigating. You might decide that you only have time to look deeper into the companies with the highest overall ratings.
However, it is also important to read the reviews. The reviews will give you extra context that the ratings cannot give you. You may find that some companies with very high reviews do not seem as promising after you learn more about them.
Keep the Right Things in Mind When Choosing Managed Service Providers
We hope that some of the ideas in this brief article on what to pay attention to when choosing managed service providers have been helpful for you. Many people get excited about picking a managed service provider and pick the first company that they find. However, the choice that you make will have a huge impact on your business down the road.
As a result, it is more than worth taking some extra time to make sure that you make the right decision. Make sure to review the landscape of managed service provider options available to you and do your due diligence before pulling the trigger on one of them.
To learn more about how to choose managed service providers or find great managed service providers, feel free to reach out and get in touch with us here at any time!