Managed services should be seen as investment and not a cost item on a budget and to explain this we need to look at how IT support was generally provided in the past.

In the past if a user hasn’t had an issue, for example a user can’t print or can’t open a document or is struggling to send an email, generally what we have seen is that the user would rather sit there for two maybe three hours trying to get things to work or trying to find ways around the problem.

The problem with this is that a task that would normally take the user 5 maybe 10 minutes to complete will end up taking 2-3 hrs. The user would then contact IT support who would then only be able to come out 2 or 3 hours later, and many times only the next day.

This obviously has cost implications over and above the cost of the actual technician coming out to site. There’s the cost of the actual lost productivity for the 6 hours that the staff member has been unable to work in that there’s a salary that needs to be paid for their time as well other costs that are not always considered such as the actual overhead costs to keep the staff member like the cost of office space, electricity and so on.

Managed services attempts to address these issues and reduce these costs by firstly making sure that your systems of fully proactively managed.