What is Managed Services and Why It’s Essential for Modern Businesses
In any hero’s journey, one of the key lessons the main protagonist often learns is that it’s rarely a good idea to go it alone. Trusted allies, friends with unique strengths and wise guides may not be the central characters of a story, but without them, the ending would often look much different.
This theme rings true in our real-world surroundings as well. If we look at the modern digital business as our hero, it’s plain to see that it’s often being beset by new challenges, demands and even growth opportunities that push urgently toward new horizons. In this journey — not of fantastical exploration or of conquering evil but of digital transformation — the greatest weapon for today’s enterprises is their network management and connectivity foundation, supported by managed network services.
So, what are managed services for your business network? Simply put, they are outsourced services provided by expert partners to manage and optimize a business’s network infrastructure, whether for small businesses or larger enterprises. Managed services are essential because they allow businesses to focus on their core competencies while ensuring their network is strong, reliable, and capable of supporting growth.
As ease, predictability and efficiency become increasingly crucial for maintaining continuity. After all, who can afford to be sidelined in today’s competitive landscape even if it’s for valuable IT investment?
The Benefits of Managed Services for a Business Network
Business in the digital era moves fast. Core competencies are becoming more complex and advanced as users and customers demand more in shorter amounts of time. In the middle of all this — and because of it — every organization needs to somehow find time to innovate, iterate and elevate their IT and networking strategies. After all, it’s at this layer where digital services, mobile customer support channels and online collaboration can thrive. Still, this often becomes your classic rock and a hard place dilemma. Meeting new requirements demands extra time, attention, resources and expertise, but it also requires even more care for existing resources, services and customer service management initiatives.
This is where the benefits of managed services truly shine. They assist businesses in creating time, expertise and efficiencies where there otherwise could be none. Outsourcing connectivity and network requirements to experts delivers a host of game-changing benefits, including:
1. Specialization
We all wish we could be jack of all trades — but we all also know that would make us master of none. Where enterprises have their own specialties and core competencies that their customers depend on, managed service providers fill the gaps and empower operations by being experts in network infrastructure and management. With new network services and capabilities comes new complexities and skills requirements — and the latest and greatest options are evolving all the time. As a result, it can be a challenge to cultivate the required level of in-house expertise at the level required — but with managed services, the burden comes off the enterprise.
2. Cost Efficiency
From burdens on personnel to burdens on bottom lines, it’s true that digital transformation often comes at a cost. Still, without it, businesses face losing customer trust and falling behind the competition — and that costs big time too. Managed services present a great way to optimize spending because they reduce the need for businesses to expand in-house teams or equipment while offering flexible pricing models. Services can be scaled as needed without taking on progressive levels of burden, making them easier on the budget without compromising technical results.
3. Reliability, Resilience and Security
One of the worst things that can happen to a modern digital business is an outage or service disruption. These translate immediately into lost revenue, but over time, they also damage trust and can make enterprises lose valuable business. Maintaining network uptime and building innate resilience is absolutely vital — but it’s not a set-and-forget task, making it difficult for some to achieve. Managed services often come with advanced monitoring capabilities and cutting-edge techniques that prioritize unfailing uptime. Furthermore, the managed service team is your ally, remaining available whenever network issues do come up. In this way, any interruptions can be quickly resolved, improving network performance and business results.
Notably, the same goes for cybersecurity and compliance needs. A managed service provider has the most advanced tools and experience to ensure your operations are never compromised.
This is just the beginning of managed services’ long list of benefits — but ultimately, one of the most profound, impactful results of integrating managed services is having trusted, 24/7 support close at hand. This level of care and expertise is very hard to achieve for most organizations, which is driving closer relationships and interdependencies between providers and enterprises.
Finding Your Managed Services Match
Of course, extracting the most value from manager services all comes down to selecting the right partner and the right services for your unique business or use case. What does the right partner look like? Well, they have to have the right mix of solutions available — but they also have to back it up with dedicated, high-touch customer support. After all, if the management and customer relationship is lackluster, what’s the point?
Glo Fiber Business is built on a promise of customer service excellence and backed by a long history of technical excellence — plus, we’ve built the managed service portfolio to match. Remaining in lock-step with modern business needs, we deliver a host of options for a range of mission-critical requirements:
1. Managed Network
A simple but sophisticated cloud-managed, all-in-one UTM and SD-WAN option, this service paves the way for unparalleled ease and advanced operations for large, distributed organizations and smaller office deployments alike. Delivering comprehensive security, ease of management (of course) and customizable configurations, this managed network solution is capable of taking any organization a quantum leap forward at their network level.
2. Managed Switch
With advantages like zero-touch deployment, advanced network diagnostics and high levels of visibility, a managed switch option lowers TCO (total cost of ownership) and takes the pressure off of in-house network administrators while pushing networking forward. An intuitive management experience, remote troubleshooting, traffic optimization capabilities and more, this represents an enterprise’s best friend when it comes to taking the complexity out of hardware management.
3. Managed WiFi
WiFi is the cornerstone of communications, mobility and more — so, to pave the way for performance excellence, solving complexity at this level is key for a host of organizations. This managed WiFi option serves as a robust wireless access point for customers and teams alike, remaining easy to deploy, configure and manage —whether for small businesses or larger organizations.. Not to mention, it gathers dynamic analytics for smarter, safer results. These benefits keep any team on track, reducing disruption while keeping networking and communications open.
Managed services like these form the new backbone of digital business, removing complexity and giving every organization the experts, allies and friends it needs in all the right places. With the magic of managed services, every enterprise network can be the hero of their own story.
Want to learn more about Glo Fiber Business’s managed options? Click here.