Each year managed IT becomes a more prevalent option as businesses increasingly turn to managed service providers (MSPs) to meet their information technology goals. However, despite this growth, managed IT and the standard services provided remain largely non-standardized and mysterious. Thankfully, this is changing, and today most MSPs offer the following five core services that—when managed effectively—also provide the greatest relative benefit to respective businesses:
Email Hosting
Email remains a critical resource for the communication and record keeping of most companies, and that importance often necessitates close management of the applications and email accounts in use. MSPs can help select, install, and customize apps for hosting email in order to integrate with major ecosystems like Microsoft and Google’s suites of online services.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Applications
CRMs have spread like wildfire in the modern business landscape, and it’s no surprise. These complex programs help companies dramatically increase their efficiency, letting them better manage customer data and interaction, access company information, automate sales procedures, manage marketing campaigns, provide customer support, and archive information and communications to digitize employee, vendor and partner relationships. In essence, CRMs become the infrastructure within which everything operates, and as such it is extremely important that the correct program be selected, customized, secured, integrated with other applications, and continually maintained in order to promote efficient business operation.
Backup and Recovery
All businesses are built on data. Data regarding past sales, customer information, accounting records, current orders, product specifications, and countless other invaluable bits of information that, if lost, could spell trouble. Unfortunately, digital files are lost all the time. Hard drives fail, computers burn out, and working files are accidentally deleted or overridden. Companies interested in avoiding these calamities need an IT solution that seamlessly generates additional copies of their information, stored safely for later retrieval, with a plan for restoring that information quickly if a situation does arrive. Managed IT can quickly develop and implement a complete backup and recovery system using both hard copies and affordable, automated cloud storage apps.
Information Storage and Access
Protecting information is only part of the struggle, however. While archived records should be backed up against disaster, in the day-to-day scope files need to be readily accessible to all appropriate company individuals, whether they be in the office or on the opposite side of the world using their cell phone. Managed IT can set up cloud storage that balances access with security, giving the right teammates remote access to their data no matter what, while making sure that all versions are saved, syncing is automatic and will keep files up to date to their latest versions, and individuals can readily collaborate when needed.
Network Monitoring
Businesses of every size are facing increased threats to their network hackers search for weaknesses and back doors in their security. Managed IT can bolster this security, hunt for flaws or weak points, and monitor networks remotely to track suspicious activity, outages, or other out-of-the-ordinary occurrences. This remote warning system puts experts on the job, responding to an issue before the client may even notice that the issue exists at all.
If you would like to learn more about Managed IT services in the East Bay Area provided by Grundig IT, please contact us at 925-528-9081 or info@grundigit.com.
