Getting the most for your money is at the forefront of every organization’s thoughts these days. In the past few years the economy has forced many to operate on a skeleton crew with a limited budget in order to survive.  Out of this need many have turned to managed services to help them keep their IT infrastructure and budget under control. So what are Managed Services?

Managed services allow an organization to keep critical services up and running and keep budgets in the black. I’m sure you’re wondering what kind of magic would tame your budget and keep critical services up and running. Believe it or not, a well-structured managed services plan can do this for you.

We’ll talk about the different types of IT consultant services in the future, but managed services is a departure from Time and Materials or Block Time because the consultant firm takes on the risk to keep your services running. The consultant group fixes all issues with the services, bring them up to date with patches and then monitor to make sure nothing changes. Should issues arise the consultant has a proper system in place to respond.

When a consultant firm first starts to manage a new service or set of services they will put a lot of time into getting the service stable and patched and set up to monitor it. There is a lot of upfront hard work that goes into making a service stable and keeping it stable; however there’s a great payoff in the end because something that is stable and monitored requires much less work to keep it that way.

Next week we’ll talk about how consultant groups, including Pinnacle, work with clients’ IT infrastructures and how those systems and models can break down over time.