A managed service provider (MSP), is a company that manages information technology services for other companies via the internet. An MSP is a "company that offers continuous outsourcing of an IT function it works on a recurring revenue model; it monitors and fixes things proactively; and it does all this over the Internet, rather than having to work hands-on at a client's office."
How will a managed service help my business
By outsourcing the day to day management and monitoring of your network you remove the need to waste any of your own or your staffs time in keeping track of and dealing with daily IT tasks (such as making sure the backup has completed successfully) and by having a professional company handle it you will improve the performance and reliability of your network which in turn will allow your staff to perform their jobs with less interruption.
Clearly you may feel that if you have someone in house that is prepared to do these daily jobs then why would you want to pay someone else to do them? In reality if you don't have a full time IT manager then it is very difficult to expect non IT people to assume responsibility for making sure on a daily basis that the backup has completed successfully, the antivirus software is up to date, people are not installing programs onto their machines that they shouldn't be, all of the machines have the latest updates and security patch's installed, there are no errors on the server indication an up coming problem and many more similar basic IT jobs.
It is an unfortunate fact that many companies that rely upon an in house member of staff to deal with these tasks end up finding out the hard way when they loose data and only realise when trying to restore the lost information that the backup hadn't work properly for the past month and thus the data is lost and under these circumstances is it reasonable to discipline the staff member because they hadn't realised that something was wrong?
Simple daily monitoring and patch management of your network is the most basic level of a managed service agreement but in reality it is possible to tailor a Managed Service agreement to cover just the monitoring and patch management through to a fully managed service and everything in between.
Are there different levels of managed service
Yes there are. It is very important to understand that the term managed service is an umbrella term for what is essentially the outsourcing of elements of your daily IT management, maintenance and support and thus some companies will require more than others. The most basic level of a managed service is the proactive monitoring and patch management of your network (which includes hardware and software auditing) which can go up to a fully managed service where all aspects or your IT are covered under one fixed monthly cost. The following section "What is a fully managed service" gives full details of what is included and thus from this you can see what other services are available and thus a company may decided that they wish to have the basic monitoring but add in hardware cover or disaster recovery.
What is a fully managed service or an "all you can eat service"