Traditional vs Modern MSP: IT tasks that Modern Managed Service Providers do better

The pandemic has changed the way we work forever. It pushed organisations to enter a new world where leveraging cloud platforms is the way to stay agile and innovative, enable automation, secure remote working, and lower IT costs. However, this shift means your organisation needs to manage these cloud platforms that are probably not within your domain knowledge. You can either manage, secure, and optimise it yourself, rely on your traditional managed service provider (MSP), or work with someone who can get the most out of your cloud apps and services.

While traditional MSPs are still able to solve many business problems, their service is characterised mainly by pre-cloud, infrastructure, or device-centric services suitable for in-office and traditional work tools. Traditional MSPs, more commonly known as break/fix support, are generally reactive approaches where your MSP only fixes what your users report as broken or not working.

Most Traditional MSPs help your business with:  

1. Network Services. Managing your LAN/WAN/WLAN/VPN and perimeter security needs.
2. Server management and monitoring. Ensure server uptime and manage incidents of service outages if they occur.
3. Desktop support. Ensure your end-users PCs are running smoothly, be it common requests or large-scale program installation, OS updates and patches, hardware preventative maintenance, etc.

While these traditional support services are still valuable, organisations need a modern approach to managed services to realise more benefits from their cloud investments. The key is to leverage continuous and rapid improvements available in your cloud services to help your people achieve more; and that is where Modern MSPs do so much better than traditional MSPs.

Modern MSPs put digital transformation at the heart of providing support services, enabling you to fully harness your cloud software investments by providing your organisation with a vision to adopt and embrace the tools you are licensed for. Apart from infrastructure-related support services, Modern MSPs help you turn your cloud software investments like Microsoft 365 into valuable solutions that help you differentiate your business in the market, engage your customers and employees better, and save time and money.

Sure, you can get a traditional MSP and engage a digital transformation company separately. But there is more value in engaging an IT partner who understands your business processes, goals, and the outcomes you want to achieve and can straight up deliver the solutions to achieve them.

Unlike having a traditional MSP for infrastructure-related support services and an IT consulting company for digital transformation, modern MSPs do better with helping you save on IT costs. Whilst you would normally engage separate providers for cybersecurity audit, process automation pilot projects, end-user training, or cloud optimisation, you can instead achieve from a Modern MSP as part of their regular offering. This value-added service helps you pursue IT initiatives without necessarily dipping into your existing IT budget.

RELATED CONTENT: Unmistakable signs your business is ready for a Modern MSP

Modern MSPs generally do better than Traditional MSPs in terms of:

1. Driving rapid business innovations. Modern MSPs help you drive digital transformation, whether it’s about managing content better, enabling real-time communication and collaboration, streamlining your business processes, or generating more insights into your data. Modern MSP’s have team resources required to be successful, including business improvement analysts, application architects, data engineers, application developers, and change management focused staff that traditional MSPs don’t have. Modern MSPs have the expertise to help you identify what you could be doing better in your business and how to achieve it.
2. Empowering evidence-based decision-making. Modern MSPs empower data-driven decision-making by helping you to use business intelligence tools to spot new business opportunities, improve program outcomes, optimise your operations, or drive actionable insights from your business data. Traditional MSPs typically do not have the knowledge or expertise to help you take advantage of your Power BI or Azure Analytics Services investments to empower your staff to find answers to unresolved questions, set measurable goals, or analyse and understand your business data better.
3. Leveraging Artificial Intelligence. Modern MSPs let you harness the power of AI to bring personalised content, enhance knowledge management, and improve user experiences. Traditional MSPs lack the transformational skills to help you unlock solutions with AI capabilities such as Microsoft Viva Topics for connecting organisational knowledge and expertise, or Viva Insights for improving personal productivity and well-being. Neither do they have the skills to help you automate processes for trivial tasks or responses to repetitive questions in a conversational way using Power Virtual Agents.  
4. Data protection at device and application levels. As mentioned earlier, traditional MSPs are more focused on network, infrastructure, and device-centric support services and while these are still important, they are not all encompassing. Modern MSPs take cybersecurity protection to a different level by implementing advanced security tools to lock your business information down to the data and application level.

A fresh approach to providing managed services

Your business can benefit from a fresh and modern approach to providing managed services, combining digital transformation with infrastructure and device-centric support services. Delivered by a Modern MSP, they help your business maximise your cloud investments, save on IT costs and time, and drive your business forward.

If you need assistance assessing your current MSP’s effectiveness, or you want to explore further what a Modern MSP can do for you, comment below or contact us here. 

Stay tuned for our next blog to learn how to evaluate MSPs.