Juggling the pressure to go digital and managing existing IT infrastructure can give cold feet to even the most seasoned IT managers. IT infrastructure is looked upon by businesses as a mean to drive transformation, so IT setups are expected to be scalable, flexible and innovative, while remaining cost-effective. Most organizations need some external expertise to get this infrastructure started. Sounds like an ideal scenario for MSPs to step in.
This is the final piece in a three-part series, exploring the changing landscape of midmarket IT needs and how MSPs can strategically tap into this opportunity. We discussed security, backup, and compliance in our previous blogs. Today we talk about the IT infrastructure needs.
Attaining Infrastructure Availability
According to Kaseya’s MSP Benchmark Survey, 30% of MSP clients seek help for infrastructure availability. The most crucial parameter for having high infrastructural availability is avoiding single point of failure and decrease downtime. More often than not, bottlenecks are from IT departments divided into silos, with each team implementing the best practices to ensure high availability of their own layer. For instance, as network engineers make sure the network is up and running, the database engineer makes data organized and accessible. The problem is that what works best for one IT silo might not work for the other. The right approach is to first get the application requirement correct, then build an implementation strategy around it for guaranteed high availability.
Monitor More to Manage More
While infrastructure availability is a common concern, network monitoring and management are just as important. Nearly 60% of MSPs cited Infrastructure Monitoring and Management amongst the fastest growing services over the past 12 months.
IT infrastructure houses multiple components including servers, business applications, storage environments, network resources, databases and security tools. For a business to run at its peak, these components need to work together, and making that happen requires more than regular upkeep.
IT infrastructure management depends heavily on accurate reporting, real-time dashboards and constant monitoring of the entire environment. The ability to monitor performance, availability and gain detailed information of key hardware and software elements, helps determine their utilization levels identify potential setbacks, and prescribe the right solution.
Moreover, as cloud and web-based services become ever more mainstream, the IT infrastructure is increasingly diversified and tough to manage. Add to it the hybrid scenarios where organizations host some data and applications on premises, citing network availability or criticality of the asset, and some in the cloud. As a result, a monitoring solution needs the same level of insight and control into the operational analytics of cloud infrastructure as it has into on-premises or virtualized infrastructure.
Why MSPs?
With mission-critical systems to run and downtime that translates directly into lost business to prevent, there is no room for compromise. While larger organizations have the tools and manpower to keep the infrastructure updated and running, it makes more sense for the midmarket to outsource these services. Shouldn’t an MME focus on what they do best and leave IT to a specialist?
Businesses need solutions that can grow and scale with needs. Outsourcing to an MSP with resources and expertise not only helps businesses scale their infrastructure up and down on-demand, but do so without burning a hole in their pocket.
Brace yourself for IoT
To date, MSPs have not been impacted much by IoT. That is about to change. As the demand for IoT enabled processes soar, IT must re-engineer business operations and ultimately rewire the IT infrastructure.
MSPs that ignore IoT could be at a competitive disadvantage. A wiser approach would be to find a customer or two with IoT-related needs. Gain familiarity with this emerging market while maintaining and expanding current revenue streams.
Kaseya to the Rescue
Kaseya is building network monitoring software directly into the company’s flagship VSA platform. VSA by Kaseya, is the industry’s first and only RMM solution that natively unifies both endpoint and network management, embeds IT documentation, and exponentially extends IT automation capabilities through crowdsourced automation.
VSA is considered an RMM 2.0 solution, as it gives MSPs and internal IT organizations a unified monitoring package that features automated, real-time insights into the performance of hybrid IT infrastructures and distributed data centers.
Interested in exploring VSA by Kaseya? See a Demo.
Want to know more about the growing needs of MSP biggest potential clients? Download the eBook.
