5 Benefits of Choosing a Managed Services Provider in Los Angeles

Choosing to shift your the management of your IT to managed services in Los Angeles is the equivilant to getting an entire 747-jumbo jet but only paying for the ticket to ride it. In the latter case, the provider—the airline—has the responsibility for maintenance, safety, and passenger comfort. The passenger enjoys all the benefits, but only uses one seat for a restricted time and distance.

Take the analogy one step further, and your “ticket” to managed IT services is the service-level agreement, which is an agreement between you and the provider of what services you get and how the overall success of services will be measured. It is like the fine print on the reverse of your airline ticket.

The biggest advantage in managed IT services for nonprofit organizations is that your company has the same capabilities as the big guys, who have the big IT staff and back room of hardware. You forgo the high salaries, equipment maintenance and upgrade headaches.

There are other advantages, and local Los Angeles managed service provider (or MSP) can be your trusted partner.

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The Benefits of Choosing a Local Los Angeles MSP

Freeing Up Your Staff

Your small IT staff can concentrate on clearing the path to your core business objectives. Everyone has experienced the crisis of system outage. The difference between hiring a small IT services company or a single IT resource is that your local MSP has a focus unhindered by the process, problems with technician turnover, or simple lack of consistency. Go local, and your service fees will never include airfare and lodging for that specialist in New Jersey who is the only person who can restore your outage.

Keeping Pace with the Demands for IT Expertise

Today’s marketplace requires highly specialized business acumen and the ability to meld that knowledge into a competitive IT-based product. Organizations everywhere are struggling to fill their IT positions. The industry is desperate to find experts in cybersecurity and mobile app development, and IT managed services provides the technically skilled and specialized engineers to alleviate those pressures.

Greater Scalability

(Analogy alert!) Scalability is to managed IT services as sipping a cold drink of water is to try to drink from a firehose. Your IT shop can spend many months—sometimes years—deploying massive systems. With the scalability of local Los Angeles MSP, organizations are finding it more efficient to begin a modest deployment with the flexibility to move fast and expand as needed.

By the way, CDW’s modular approach to managed services makes scalability easy. For example, a retail business will need increased IT capacity during the holidays, or a startup might experience sudden, unexpected growth. Scalability is the key to avoiding the firehose effect.

24/7 Availability

Globalism has made the 9-to-5 workday as obsolete as the floppy disk. Users and customers work and buy around the clock, and your IT network must be responsive on days, nights, weekends or holidays. While switching to a local MSP is no absolute guarantee of a deeper vendor-client relationship, proximity promotes effective communication. Local MSPs leverage that communication advantage over the phone or more intimately through face-to-face resources like GoToMeeting or Skype.

Incidentally, what does a customer care about most when it comes to solving personal computer or cell phone issues? That would be the vendor’s ability to understand and address the problem and to communicate the resolution to the customer. Local MSPs do that better because they can communicate better.

Shifting the Burden of Compliance

Perhaps a better title heading here would be “easing the burden” because no organization is completely off the hook when it comes to HIPAA or other federal and state regulations. On the other hand, partnering up with a local MSP makes the customer’s position on that hook a bit more comfortable. When businesses are faced with privacy and system security regulations and the absolute need to avoid data breaches and compromises, no organization can efficiently shoulder all the burden of all that compliance.

Yes, CDW understands and keeps up with the myriad regulations and nuances of HIPAA and all the privacy, financial, and education-related acts. CDW has the systems, processes and churns out the reports that guarantee an organization’s compliance.

Which leads us back to our first point: That worrisome IT support burden is no longer totally on in-house staff.

By making sure your business is aware of the advantages and disadvantages of working with a local MSP, you can make a much better well-informed decision about your IT needs.;

Ultimately, it’s your customers who benefit. If they see your responsive, fast-acting, and offer effective help, then it won’t matter to them if you’re IT services are in-house or external.

Have you worked with external IT teams? Or, are you currently working with an IT team in Los Angeles? Share what you learned by leaving a comment below.

Download our guide that is designed to help you understand the ins & outs of the Managed Services methodology and help you make educated decisions on how best to utilize it for your own company.

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