Many middle market businesses are operating in the dark ages of technology. These companies face a higher risk for cyberattacks and are wasting money maintaining outdated hardware. Middle market companies are typically supported by an IT Managed Service Provider (MSP), which is responsible for supporting customers’ daily IT operations and serves as an outsourced IT department. Middle market businesses rely on their MSP to protect their technology assets in a cost-effective manner, but MSPs don’t always follow through.
Here's how to determine if your company is being misguided by your MSP:
1. Your MSP hasn’t suggested you get rid of your file servers and migrate file sharing to OneDrive or Dropbox. Storing local versions of files on server drives or hardware is a thing of the past. Your local servers face a higher risk of being hacked and the data being subject to ransomware. Additionally, the process of running and maintaining offsite backups is not cost effective. In the cloud, a company can securely move an unlimited amount of data. A company’s Microsoft 365 enterprise subscription comes with one terabyte of data storage per user. In today’s world, this is essentially unlimited storage. In a few minutes, your IT administrator can set up shared secured folders following directions on Microsoft’s website here. Dropbox provides this functionality as well. Plus, they both have the same revision control functionality where you can restore a previous version of a folder or file at any point in time.
2. Your MSP isn’t encouraging you to host applications in the cloud. Moving applications to the cloud reduces risk, improves processing speed, and saves money. Unless you’re running a software company, the vulnerability of your company’s computer hardware is higher than any of the major cloud service providers such as Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure. Moreover, the failover capabilities offered by cloud service providers can protect your data during major events, including grid failures, hurricanes, and earthquakes. Additionally, a local server doesn’t necessarily promise faster processing. Today’s cloud services are provided over state-of-the-art, high-speed lines. Anyone working remotely would have faster response time accessing a server in the AWS or Azure cloud than a server hosted internally. The cost savings of avoiding the time required to run and administer backups, apply server patches, run updates, provide physical security, and monitor the servers typically more than offsets the cloud hosting provider fees.
3. Your MSP hasn’t convinced you to migrate Outlook from the Microsoft Exchange Server to Microsoft 365. Microsoft 365 hosts small and large businesses productivity tools, including email, calendars, video conferencing, and Office applications in the cloud. This means no local hardware (except your laptop) or network is required to run the Microsoft productivity tools. Any security or feature updates are managed by Microsoft. Prior to Microsoft 365, hosting email and calendar services for a business required an on-site exchange server. Managing an exchange server requires personnel to monitor the server, apply patches, and provide physical security and backups. Keeping an exchange server and not migrating to Microsoft 365 costs business more and adds the risk of lost data or a cyber breach.
4. Your MSP has installed software to automate and/or delay Windows Updates. On the surface, the idea of automating software updates sound like a good idea. But when a new Windows update is released, there are usually issues that prevent laptops from working as expected. Following the Windows update release, Microsoft later releases patches to address the issues. Given this history, your business likely doesn’t want to be part of the first wave of a new Windows release. Your IT administrator might set rules to delay functionality or quality updates by a week. This is long enough to catch mistakes and give you peace of mind that an update won’t shut your business down. However, security updates should never be delayed as they guard against hackers and viruses. There are new ways of getting computer viruses every day, so you don’t want to leave your team vulnerable.
First, give your current MSP a chance. Send your MSP’s Account Manager this article to get their thoughts. If they get offended, perhaps it's time to find another MSP.
Best advice is to look for an MSP who can support you in one of the leading cloud environments (Azure or AWS). Some of the leading MSPs have specific support models for migrating to the cloud.
