By Aleksandrina Vasileva

Aleksandrina Vasileva

Today’s world revolves around technology. Hardly any business is on its path to thrive without making use of technological advancements. Managed services are powerful tools that can help your business stand out and free time and creative energy to concentrate on core business development tasks.

Utilizing managed services to fit the unique needs of the company is the best way to ensure success. Chances are that your business relies either highly or specifically on some kind of IT operations. Even minor daily service outages can be challenging and create bigger problems later if they’re not appropriately managed in time.

Consider reaching out to a managed service provider (MSP) if your business relies heavily on IT infrastructure to support its daily operations, your in-house team doesn’t possess the necessary qualifications or have the time to competently take care of maintenance, updates and repairs and if you want to have predictable financial expenses, as most MSPs have monthly flat rates.

Here are the top five managed services and how to make the most of them.

Cloud Automation

During the last decades, the potential of cloud computing unfolded before our eyes. Its capacities and power have now become so intertwined with the way we work and how we think of technology that a new era is emerging. On-demand availability of computing power and data management of the cloud makes it easier than ever to share data, which came in really handy while working remotely.

Cloud solutions are so popular now that Silicon Valley venture capital company Greylock Partners considers 2021 as the onset of the cloud-only era. This means that more future businesses will depend on cloud environments to secure cloud computing, storage and networking power. Imagine how much valuable time would be wasted if all these cloud tasks were managed manually.

Essentially, cloud automation consists of automating the whole cloud workflow and cloud-native processes. It’s good if your business uses cloud automation services from the three most popular cloud providers Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure. Though if you wish to accelerate success, you should also take advantage of infrastructure enhancing tools such as Puppet, Terraform or Ansible (types of infrastructure as code, or IAC) tools to reduce human error and context loss as well as configuration drifts.

Cybersecurity

Last year was marked by the COVID-19 pandemic and even if the vaccine is our light in the tunnel, when the whole world primarily works online, fears of a cyberpandemic are on the rise. Massive cyberattacks were attempted worldwide, some of them resulting in actual damage such as leaked credentials. In fact, a Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report for 2020 states that the most common types of attacks are denial-of-service (hacking), credential theft, social breaches and errors.

It is increasingly important for companies to be confident that their technology is secure and optimised to prevent attempted attacks. You simply can no longer afford to neglect security. Even small-to-midsized enterprises (SMEs) can be a target for cyberattacks — they made up about 30% of the cyberattack victims last year.

Thus, there shouldn’t be any compromises when it comes to business-owned or client data storage and the way it is used. Although most of the major firms keep their IT security teams in-house, SMEs whose business isn’t IT-centered choose to outsource security maintenance for areas where they may lack …

… a sufficient cybersecurity maturity level. As your company’s business grows and evolves, its cybersecurity vulnerability should be minimized with regular tests, patches and installments of new gateways.

Database Management

What makes a tech company’s heart pump besides high-quality technical expertise? That’s right, databases. Whenever there is a problem with your company’s database, the business will also be affected. That’s why it is vital to keep it organized and managed.

The three main components of a seamless IT infrastructure are the way it is built, the application deployment and the regular maintenance of the whole IT environment. Given that databases take up a huge part of IT environments, it’s equally important that it is effectively managed.

When you choose to hire a third party for this service you can rely on external experts to keep your database healthy. No matter whether your database is relational, such as MySQL, Oracle or Postgres, or nonrelational, such as MongoDB, DocumentDB or Redis, keep in mind that those professionals will need to have good provisional skills as one of the main responsibilities will be capacity planning according to your business needs. Moreover, managed service providers will take care of application-specific monitoring and security measures.

Directory Servers and SSO

Among the greatest challenges the pandemic has created for businesses working from home is that remote server monitoring and performance management have become top priorities. What essentially constitutes a directory server is a customizable information storage containing resources and services that are being distributed through the network and can be located and accessed by users.

SSO, short from single sign on, refers to an authentication scheme, providing the user with the opportunity to use a single ID and password for login to related but independent software systems. The challenge arises when the environment isn’t well-managed and as a result files cannot be located or downtime occurs.

To ensure that your business servers perform their best you can rely on an MSP to monitor your servers for you, while also cutting down financial expenses. The most valuable service performance monitoring tasks your MSP partner will handle are to monitor devices from multiple vendors with OS types, set appropriate performance baselines and monitoring intervals as well as problems with SSO configuration and management.

Managed Operating Systems

If your business is now going through digital transformation or you experience cloud transition, it’s likely that your devices have various operating systems such as Windows, Linux or MacOS. The proper management of the OS is an essential step if you want to spare your team unnecessary headaches.

There are numerous types of Linux OS open source software technologies and enterprise solutions such as RedHat, CentOS, Fedora, Ubuntu, SUSE and Debian. They all have specifications and different knowledge is required to take the most advantage of all these solutions can offer.

Even if you already have an in-house IT department with system administrators taking care of software automation and OS updates, collaborating with a managed service provider can bring value to your team.

The time where it was typical to have an understanding and practical knowledge of all kinds of IT processes so you can manage all your company’s processes on your own is over. Today it is far more practical and beneficial to trust outside vendors with your IT operations maintenance. For a fraction of an in-house team’s cost, you get qualified partners that become valuable assets of your own team.

Aleksandrina Vasileva is a marketing specialist at Dreamix, a custom software development company. Her teaching background mixed with interest in psychology drives her to share knowledge. She is an avid reader and enthusiastic blogger. You may follow her on LinkedIn or @Dreamix_Ltd on Twitter.