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

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There are a lot of managed service providers (MSPs) in Australia, but many of them are not very good. Most are struggling to make a profit and stay in business. We worked with one that was supposed to be good and had been around for a long time, which should give you some assurances. They also had a development arm, as many of these MSPs do. They all seem to have development arms and tech advisory boards, but their bread and butter is supposed to be outsourced admin work.

But for the MSP from whom we ended up getting resources, their entire business exists to clean up after everybody else because there are so many bad actors that are all trying to upsell you. And because I began at Kyco as a virtual CTO, I didn't see all the invoices until I became full-time. That’s when I said, "These numbers are ridiculous. We are being overcharged." And even the contracts were wrong because either the MSP was set up by tech people who were sloppy with the business side of things, or they were set up by business people who don't know enough about the tech side of things.

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MSP's are an option for an outsourced or partially outsourced IT department but they tend to be on the expensive side and don't typically provide the same customer service you would get from an inhouse employee. At the end of the day, the question is what is the goal for the MSP option and who is driving the decision.

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Our experience with our MSP has been a long standing relationship that has been advantageous to our needs. We evaluate the performance annually and find that partnering with an MSP is easier than supporting those needs from within.

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It seems as if managed service providers come and go. This reality makes stability and confidence in a sustainable solution, tricky. Our experience has been fairly limited, while mixed.

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In general, my experience with MSP’s has been very positive, but I have found at times their level of service degrades after the initial 6-months of the commitment. I have found that they initially have been very responsive to our needs and requests because they want to establish a good connection. For the large established MSP’s, I have found the level of service over time remains fairly consistent; however, with smaller MSP’s that are growing faster than they can truly handle, the level of service degrades as resources shift between accounts.

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Used MSPs in the APAC region specially for work that we want to offload from our internal teams.

I think they are a great solution as long as the training and enablement goes well and the performance lives up to the expectations.

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my last company have one of business for managed service providers (MSPs), we provide NOC and call center 24 hours , we also giving consultation for network, security & data center

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My experience is that they can be valuable depending on many factors within your business. It depends on if you have a single head office or several locations nationally/internationally. You also need to be very clear on the outcomes that you expect and manage the MSP to this. I have not found it to be more expensive than insourcing but again it depends on your business.

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Within a Hybrid It department MSP can be a valuable and essential source of skill and resources that a internal team cannon fulfil. Some services like SOC and SEIM are arguably better outsourced and creating and more importantly continuously training and retaining resources of that type can be a real challenge. Cost are high but again the cost of retention in a very competitive market place can be even higher for some scarce skills.

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We engage with multiple MSPs for differenty locations/business units. The nature of the business means it is simply not cost effective to do it in-house. My top observations are:
- Big MSPs provide wider range of services but the service levels can be very varied, depending on if you are a "big fish" or "small fish" in their pond; and also with the high turnover of their staff you could get gaps in handovers and skillsets
- Smaller MSPs tend to be more responsive as they tend to have smaller set of clients; the service can be a bit more personal; though they tend to be restricted in the type of services, and locations covered due to the small size
- In general all MSPs get somewhat complacent and reactive as time goes on, as they know it is rather painful for the clients to change MSPs unless something significant goes wrong. It's up to the client to enforce review process and keep them on SLAs
- I haven't personally dealt with one which I would rate 8+ out of 10, consistently

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

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