How to choose a long-term managed solution

Managed IT solutions are a useful way to get long-term support for your own in-house IT team, so that they don’t have to waste profitable time on repetitive, low-value admin tasks.

Choosing a long-term managed solution provider removes this burden from in-house IT professionals. This not only frees up their time for more valuable activities, but can also make highly qualified personnel feel recognised and appreciated.

All too often, IT professionals have undergone graduate and postgraduate education, professional accreditation and ongoing industry qualifications, only to be tasked with entry-level admin on a daily basis.

So how do you choose a long-term managed solution that relieves your team of their more basic duties, while also adding substantial value to your organisation’s IT systems and processes?

Choosing a long-term managed IT solution

There are many different managed IT solutions available, so how do you know which one is right for you, and how can you be sure that it will continue to meet your needs over the long term?

First of all, decide what you want your long-term managed IT solution to deliver. This could be one or more of a number of common capabilities:

• Hosted applications, desktop or telephony
• Network and server hosting
• Security (antivirus, anti-spam, firewalls etc)

It’s a list that goes on and on. You might opt for remote monitoring of the health of your IT systems, with preventative maintenance when an error is in its very early stages. Or you might choose ongoing asset management with recommendations of any updates and upgrades you might need.

For many office-based businesses, you might just want an Office 365 Managed Services partner. APH can deploy Office 365 and migrate your existing emails and other data over, or if you already have it deployed and just want a new O365 Managed Services partner, we can step in.

With so many managed IT services on the market, you might want to arrange an initial no-obligation consultation to decide what you actually need. APH can offer this to help you choose how to invest in long-term managed IT, just give us a call to book today.

How to choose a long-term managed solution provider

As well as deciding on the managed IT service you need, you’ll also want to choose a long-term managed solution provider who can offer that service to a high standard.

We believe in establishing strong long-term collaborations with our clients. This ensures you can trust us to take pre-emptive action if we detect an emerging fault or to recommend any necessary security measures to safeguard against new cybersecurity threats.

Our team offers 24×7 intelligence monitoring of hardware and software assets alike. We can monitor physical and virtual machines, LAN and WAN networks, critical hardware such as switches, routers and uninterruptible power supplies, and your primary data storage whether it’s physical or in the cloud.

This is all part of our Managed IT Support Care service, tailored to suit the size of your business and the budget you have available.

To find out more about any of our long-term managed solutions for business IT, hardware and software including Office 365, contact APH today for a free consultation.