What exactly is a managed IT services provider?

If your business is not related to IT, implementing hardware and software solutions can feel like jumping down the rabbit hole. IT can take up a lot of time, effort, and expertise to set up, use, and maintain—so much so, that it can take resources away from your business and keep it from reaching its full potential.

Furthermore, your IT staff can become stretched to the max, especially when hardware failures, cyberattacks, or other technical difficulties occur. Whether it’s at these moments or during a planned business review, you may start considering using a managed IT services provider (MSP) in Toronto. Managed IT solutions in Toronto can cover all of your on-premises and cloud-based IT needs and requirements.

What Is a Managed IT Services Provider?

Sure, it’s easy to read a web page under the “Services” tab and get the gist: help desk, managed services , cloud services , disaster recovery , VoIP, cybersecurity. As an industry, we’ve worked hard to hone the right mix of offerings that will provide the most value to the customers we serve. But do the things we do fully describe who we are?

By definition, MSPs are companies that are made up of various types of IT specialists that can proactively manage and deliver custom IT solutions. These include cybersecurity, cloud computing, data backup, and data recovery. MSPs also set up and carefully monitor all system connections and security measures to take preventative action against potential data breaches and cybersecurity threats.

What Are the Benefits of an MSP?

As you consider the services of an MSP, keep in mind these benefits of hiring an MSP that truly define top-tier providers:

Passion

We start here because it’s actually the “secret sauce” to what makes us tick. MSPs live and breathe this stuff. We wake up every day eager to eliminate and prevent technical problems for our customers—to bring a level of professionalism that not only shows the industry in the best possible light, but also illuminates the passion we have for what we do. While your organization may have IT because you feel it’s necessary to “keep the lights on,” we have IT because it’s who we are. It’s hard to overstate the difference this makes to the way your IT is managed.

Investment

When you sign on with an MSP in Toronto, you’re essentially getting what we have in terms of IT infrastructure. Part of the passion and professionalism noted above means that we make the investments necessary to provide world-class support services, world-class network performance, world-class servers, world-class security, world-class uptime, world-class storage, world-class data recovery…you get the picture.

But equipment actually isn’t the whole picture. There are also the software investments on the ticketing system, for example, or the dashboards to provide customers with on-demand status updates. There are investments in back-up power, physical security on the buildings we have, and heating, cooling, and ventilation to keep systems running smoothly. Having made these investments means, quite simply, you don’t have to.

Certifications

What investment did we miss above? People. It is incumbent upon the IT MSP in Toronto to not only keep your systems up to date, but to stay ahead of the curve. Vendor certifications are our way of demonstrating our people’s commitment to being state-of-the-art.

While your organization may struggle with the budget to enroll staff in the latest technical education, it is part of our product—we simply have to do it. And certifications are not just an individual thing—they often apply to the whole organization, like Cisco Premium Partner certification or being SSAE-18 compliant.

Processes

The starkest difference between the way small and medium businesses do IT and the way MSPs in Toronto do IT comes down to processes. From the initial quote you receive, to the onboarding, to the first help desk call, to the on-site visit, to the major project—all are ticketed, executed uniformly, carefully documented in purpose-built systems, and are often reported back to you.

And let’s be clear, these processes didn’t happen by magic—they are the result of “blood, sweat, and tears,” honed over the years during a quest for continuous improvement in our service delivery. If you examine your own processes and find them lacking, signing on with a top-tier MSP will, by extension, transform your IT operations into a well-oiled machine.

Experience

Often, experience is characterized by length of time (in fact, XBASE’s 33 years is expressed exactly this way!), but the true value of experience should actually be measured in breadth.

The benefit you receive from outsourcing managed IT solutions in Toronto is the MSP’s exposure to a broad range of environments, technical challenges, cyberattacks, disaster scenarios, and specialized industry requirements (and don’t forget regional requirements like PIPEDA for doing business in Canada and GDPR for Canadian firms doing business in the EU).

By being able to learn from a broad range of customer engagements, and even by being able to cross-pollinate the data gleaned from them, one of the benefits of MSPs is that they can often provide insights you may not see yourself, plus get to solutions much more quickly and confidently. And, if you happen to present something entirely new, we have a vast toolbox to pull from to formulate a sound strategy.

Why Opt for XBASE Technologies as a Preferred MSP in Toronto?

If you’re ready to have an MSP in Toronto get to know your systems intimately, tailor solutions to your needs, and provide proactive support and insight at all times, then you’re ready for Exponentially Better™ IT services from XBASE Technologies. But don’t just take our word about our value—check out what our clients have to say about the years of service we have provided them. Contact us today for more information.