What has your experience been with managed service providers (MSPs)?

Team & Organizational DesignOutsourcing & Managed Services
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CIO in Finance (non-banking)3 years ago

We use Ricoh (formerly mindSHIFT) as our MSP. They are great at augmenting my small infrastructure team. System availability is reliable.  Using their data centers and servers transformed my budget from capital expense to operational.

Enterprise IT Manager in Services (non-Government)3 years ago

Some are good, but most are too hands off for my liking.  I believe you get better support for the end user when the team that's providing service has a vested interest in the company.  There are nuances, etc. that no MSP can know working from the outside in.  
Personally, I have brought everything back in-house, and we farm out for contractors if/when required, where me may not have specific skill sets.

Group Chief Information Officer in Construction3 years ago

It took us a decade to build a strategic group of MSPs.
We kept suffering from over promise by sales team and no/under deliver by post sales. Unfortunately it’s very difficult to find some MSP who look at client as strategic partners for long run rather most focused on short term benefits

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Sr. Managing Director in Finance (non-banking)3 years ago

Our experience will depend on who we end up with as MSP and how do we manage them. Just signing a contract and leaving them alone may not give desired results. Having regular checks, solid SLAs, understanding of their resources, skill set and making them as partners (rather than vendors) leads to success. 

CIO in Education3 years ago

Have used MSPs for outsourcing Help Desk, Tech Support, and First Level Application Support.  The advantage is cost savings if you are using offshore resources.  Also over time a solid knowledge base can be built.  There is definitely a learning curve.  
Currently we outsource our Monitoring of our critical network assets.   Security as a Service.  It is working great because we get 24x7 monitoring of our critical assets.  Also installing on premise security appliances and maintaining security apps could be very expensive.
Moving to the hybrid cloud.  Leveraging distributed apps is a big plus  AWS, Azure, Bluemix, Google all have unique and compelling propositions. 

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