Managed Services

Introduction to managed services

What is a managed service?

A managed service is a service you purchase from a vendor with the expertise, personnel and infrastructure necessary to deliver exactly what you need, when you need it. One type of managed service can be thought of like a toll road. The entire road is available anytime you need it, 24 hours a day and seven days a week. You can use it to travel 5 miles or 100. But you don't have to raise the funds to build the road or hire contractors to design and construct it. You don't worry about filling the potholes, plowing the snow or paying the state police to patrol it. You pay a fee to assure the road is available when you need it.

Like toll roads, managed services generally involve large, complex constellations of infrastructure and personnel. In the case of information technology services, they often encompass elaborate hardware and software, with large data centers to house them and staffs of trained personnel to keep them running 24/7.

Like a toll road, a managed service provides excellent value because you share the cost with other users. By serving multiple customers from the same facility, the managed service provider (MSP) offers economies of scale that you could not achieve on your own. You split the cost of using the most advanced technology with other users and gain access to highly experienced IT experts. But you pay for only as much of those resources as you actually need.

While it allows you to share the costs, a good MSP makes you feel like you have the service all to yourself. It's as though you were speeding down the New Jersey Turnpike with no other car in sight. If you buy a managed firewall service, for example, you get 100 percent of the service you paid for. You're not aware that other customers are receiving the same service, maybe even on the same hardware array. You don't see your neighbors, you don't hear them and they don't affect the quality of your service. Nor do they compromise your privacy or security. The service provider sees to it.

Categories of managed services

Practically any service that an organization prefers not to operate on its own can be outsourced to an MSP. The most popular candidates are complex services, services that involve a great deal of data, those that require expensive equipment and those that require a large staff, or staff with very specific expertise. Some likely areas include:

o Data center operation
o Network management and security
o IT systems maintenance and troubleshooting
o Data storage, including backup and archiving
o Virtual private networks (VPNs)
o Voice networks, including voice over IP (VoIP)
o Converged voice and data networks
o Disaster recovery and business continuity
o Call center technology
o Turnkey call center services
o Managed unified communications

How a managed service works

The primary parties involved in a managed service are the agency and the MSP. The service provider may work with many subcontractors, and of course, it purchases hardware and software from numerous vendors. It might also provide facilities, such as local telecommunications capacity. But all those relationships are transparent to the agency.

That means the agency doesn't have to worry about evaluating network routers, bargaining for a better price on operating system software or ensuring that data packets transmitted from St. Louis to Los Angeles arrive in good shape every time. The agency benefits from a vast network of product and service partners but receives just one invoice. The MS P handles all the relationships required to ensure the promised level of service.

Within this relationship, the service provider's responsibility is to