Managed services can run your cloud, supervise your backups, and generally ensure that your IT runs more smoothly. With specialized expertise, managed services providers ensure a level of service internal IT teams can’t match. To get the most benefit, select your managed service provider carefully.
Choosing a Managed Services Provider
As with most technology decisions, selecting the right vendor starts by understanding your requirements:
- Identify the kind of service you want. You can use a managed services provider to handle specialized functions or run your entire IT infrastructure. Understanding the scope of the services you want is important to assessing the capability of the provider. Your strategic goals should drive this choice, whether you want to introduce new technology, improve performance, reduce cost, or have another objective.
- Evaluate the security of the service. Managed services necessarily require exposing your data to a third party, even when the service is provided entirely on your premises. If the service is provided via the cloud, security issues become even bigger due to the need to transmit data and the shared nature of cloud resources. Make sure you can meet compliance regulations and satisfy auditors with this vendor’s service.
- Assess the provider’s expertise. The whole goal of managed services is to benefit from a provider with more expertise than you have internally. Evaluate the provider’s expertise, by reviewing their certifications and other formal credentials as well as their history of providing similar service to organizations like your own. Check whether they have experience in your industry as well as the technology. You may be able to meet your needs with one provider or may want to work with multiple providers with different areas of specialization. Working with a single provider usually makes management and oversight easier and cheaper.
- Make sure they can provide the level of service you need. The service level agreement with the provider will state the uptime and response time guaranteed by the provider. Understand what your requirements are in order to make sure those commitments match with your business needs. Check whether they can customize their service to your specific requirements.
dcVAST’s managed services provide expert support throughout your data center. Whether running your cloud with managed AWS, supporting data governance and compliance with managed Enterprise Vault, ensuring successful backups with managed NetBackup, or helping you integrate hyperconverged infrastructure into your organization with managed Nutanix services, the experienced team at dcVAST shared our deep knowledge with our clients. Contact us to learn how managed services from dcVAST can help you reduce your information technology headaches.
