The idea of managed services is no longer a foreign one to most nonprofit organizations. Despite the fact managed service providers have been around for a long time, adoption and overall use and adoption has remained relatively low.
According to recent research from IT industry trade association CompTIA, that trend is starting to change as more organizations look to managed services providers for certain services.
According to a report that was published earlier late last year, only three out of 10 organizations have any of their IT services in the hands of a managed service provider. However, in CompTIA’s Fourth Annual Trends in Managed Services Study that was released in May 2015, 2/3 of all respondents reported using have at least some of their services of an outside IT firm.
These results could be a sign of a shifting paradigm, where organizations are becoming more familiar and comfortable with the idea of putting their IT in the hands of an IT firm.
IT Partners
As our organizations grow everything get s a little bit more complicated as new processes are implemented, people are hired and technology changes, layers are added to the onion. The same can be said for most large organizations’ IT staff and infrastructure, which subsequently leads to greater level of complexity and increase chances for an IT staff to miss something.
“Very few of these companies get rid of their IT staffs just because they join up with an MSP,” said the report’s author, Carolyn April, a senior director of Industry Analysis at CompTIA.
Because of this increased complexity, large organizations often partner very closely with a managed services provider to find and fix problems and redundancies within their infrastructure.
“It elevates the IT staff and brings them out of the shadows within the organization,” she says. “It allows them to focus on a custom app dev project or cloud initiative — something highly strategic. I think that’s a win-win for your IT staff.”
Tech Impact believes this collaboration is key to success when nonprofits work with managed service providers. Organizations have found when outsourcing their email hosting, CRM applications, storage, backup and recovery to a managed services provider their IT related costs go down, and their existing IT staff is more productive on business critical projects.
