Buying Guide to Managed Services

Managed Services

Let us make a distinction about the services we provide. They fall into three categories: 1) Managed Services, 2) Co-Managed Services, and 3) Project Services. The chart below identifies about seventy (70) tasks. The managed services are offered to clients in various bundles depending on the needs of the business, its size, risk factors, and budget. The tasks under Managed Services are primarily maintenance functions and are all provided on a scheduled basis to keep your business up-to-date with known IT threats and your hardware and software vendor recommendations. If the identified task is not maintenance-related, then it is classified as Project Service.

Why do we make such a distinction among services? The IT industry recommends with ample experience that if comprehensive preventative maintenance is performed regularly the likelihood is higher that there will be no surprise problems that require extensive recovery time and costs. As you likely can also appreciate, for both your business and ours it’s hard to build a profitable and sustainable business if it offers “Unlimited Support” 24x7x365 at a reasonable price for products that we don’t recommend, sell, install, or maintain. Consider a restaurant business with a moderate-cost buffet line. It can’t stay profitable if the customer can eat all it wants and also take food home to eat later. That business mode is not sustainable!

Preventative Maintenance = Higher Reliability and Lower Costs

As such, if the hardware we are troubleshooting for you was not purchased from us and/or the device is not currently covered by the Manufacturer’s warranty, a care pack, or a maintenance agreement, then it is in Our sole discretion as to whether We will cover this work under the Scope of a Managed Service Agreement or Project Agreement. The same goes for known problematic software with poor security, non-existent updates, and known deficiencies. We want you to efficiently and cost-effectively work with a recommended Technology Platform.

Typically, that means you won’t utilize equipment that is out of warranty, considered obsolete, prone to failure, or on its last functional legs. We will want to work with you to develop a paced investment strategy for hardware and software upgrades to stay current with industry standards and best practices.

To see the widely respected definition of Managed Services refer to CompTIA’s Buying Guide to Managed Services.

The following is a list of over 60 covered tasks included in a comprehensive Managed Services Agreement:

Looking at this chart should help you decide if your staff can perform these maintenance tasks on a similarly regular schedule.  Why not liberate your staff to perform other necessary business profit-making functions and leave the repetitive IT maintenance tasks to Flagstaff Tech Net?

When hiring Flagstaff Tech Net as your managed services provider you need to look at your budget to determine what you can afford. If you’re going to pay roughly the same amount to hire us as you would to hire an internal team, you may be better off using your employees than us.   Maybe!

The average IT helpdesk employee earns about $68,000 per year or $5,667 per month. By contrast, many MSPs charge between $150 and $200 per user per month, which means even at a higher rate, your business could pay an MSP to support 28 users per month before matching what you’d pay for only one new employee.

Hiring a managed services provider also reduces the amount of expensive software you need to buy. We generally have the best tools for their industry, providing extra benefits to our customers.  

#

(1) Only applies to when using the Backup Platforms in our Recommended Technology Platform.

(2) This assumes that you already have the back-end systems and company-wide configurations all set up and configured for this product. If you don’t, then we will discuss with you the scope of any potential Project and provide you with a separate Proposal for your review.

(3) If the Hardware we are troubleshooting was not purchased from us and/or the device is not currently covered by the Manufacturer’s warranty or their “care pack” or a maintenance agreement, then it is in Our sole discretion as to whether we will cover this work under a Managed Services contract, Co-Managed contract, or as Project.