How to Determine Your Managed Services ROI
Managed services can be used to bridge gaps in your company’s tech or even be a proper solution to having a full time IT specialist on-site. But as with all components in your business, how do you know that the managed services ROI is justifying itself?
It’s not as easy to determine as you might think. Especially if you have both an IT specialist hired on and you chose to supplement their skills with a managed services provider. While in the either/or binary you can rather easily come up with a savings versus cost analysis. However, in the alternative where you both have an MSP and a specialist hired on, it’s less straightforward to determine what the cost benefits of the MSP are.
While there are a great many websites online that promise to calculate those costs for you, it’s still better to know why those numbers come up and therefore avoid making a mistake when it comes to deciding between hiring an MSP versus going it alone.
With that in mind, let’s take a look at some of the ways to calculate how you can best maximize the value for your dollar when it comes to managed services ROI.
The Tech Barrier
MSPs can serve as a great way to keep your tech updated and secure.
Consider that by 2022, 62% of all organizations will run 100% of their IT in the cloud, according to a survey by BetterCloud.
With that movement comes a greater responsibility on IT providers, and MSPs can be there to amplify and bolster your business’s IT department.
Not only that, but there’s a great many savings to be derived from that move. For instance, power consumption will be brought down, security risks lowered, and maintenance costs will be reduced considerably.
Which is to say that there are a great many ancillary costs to keeping everything in-house that should not be discounted when calculating your managed services ROI.
Specialization
According to a survey done by CompTia, more than a third of respondents said that their everyday IT tasks are completed by people whose primary responsibility is not IT.
A lack of specialization or a potential for these people to be overwhelmed by the ever-increasing demand of IT could end up costing your company in the long-run.
While it is hard to put a number on this (in fact, the survey points out the increasing difficulty in determining managed services ROI), it is certainly a factor worth considering when thinking about MSPs.
Calculate Error Rates
The reason we have IT specialists is because stuff happens. Things go wrong. Our networks encounter errors, slowdown, or sometimes even shut off completely.
This time can be a huge detriment to your business. Calculating how much time your networks spend down, how many people you need to handle the fixing of said networks, how much all this wasted productivity is costing your business can again help you come to a conclusion of whether an MSP is warranted or not.
To MSP or Not to MSP?
At the end of the day, there’s going to be benefits and drawbacks to having an in-house versus MSP provided IT support. Much depends on your business’ long-term goals and the strategic initiatives that are chosen to realize those goals.
Narrowing it down to a specific managed service ROI number can be tricky at times, though not impossible. Ultimately, you have to determine if your company would use and truly benefit from having the extra support and manpower that MSPs offer.
PCM Canada, a PCM Canada company, is an award-winning managed services firm offering transformative technology solutions to midsize and enterprise-level organizations. Contact us to learn more about our software, cloud services, data centre and managed IT solutions.
