What is MITS?

Managed IT Services. Managed Service Provider. Managed IT Solutions. 

What do all of these mean? Just like everything in life, there’s more than one way to communicate about an idea — and all of these examples do the exact same thing — provide organizations outside their own with professional IT support.

So, if you’ve got a meeting to run to, and you needed the definition to “MITS,” here’s the quick answer; MITS offers your organization the benefit of knowing your entire IT infrastructure is taken care of, without having to manage it on your own.

There’s a lot to unpack in that statement, however. So if you’ve got a couple more minutes, read on — you just might learn something.

WHAT ARE THE BENEFITS OF MITS?

The simplest analogy for MITS is to compare it to a subscription service like Netflix. Netflix costs a set amount of money per month, offers a wide variety of titles to choose from, and is accessible whenever you want it.

MITS is pretty much that. MITS providers offer service packages with a fixed cost that are billed monthly, often allow you to choose which of their services you would like to use, and monitor your network 24/7/365.

We can go even further with this analogy; what’s more economical, filming your own movies to compete with Netflix’s library, or spending $14 (if Netflix’s price hasn’t gone up) per month? Unless you’re a Hollywood director, most likely, the more affordable option is the subscription’s cost.

So, what’s more economical, hiring your own CIO, IT director, engineers, specialists, and techs, or hiring a business’ services that is already built up and trained to manage a business’ network?

A MITS team is capable of improving your business’ operational efficiency and reducing your overhead simultaneously. These goals can be met via different routes – whether through upgrading your operations in order to improve the speed at which your organization does business, by reducing the workload of your own internal IT department, or even completely negating the need to maintain an in-house IT team. Let’s go over some specific scenarios:

REDUCE HARDWARE COSTS

Just like software, hardware is advancing and evolving continuously. Keeping up with the costs of maintaining and upgrading hardware can be a significant drain on your resources – often reducing the capital available for other much needed aspects of growing your enterprise ecosystem.

Not only can a MITS team manage your hardware, they can also offer another option: management of cloud services.

Cloud services are more secure, easier to implement, and less expensive to maintain than traditional on-site servers. For more about cloud services, visit our blog, How Much Do Cloud Services Cost?

REDUCE MAINTENANCE COSTS

There are two types of maintenance in the tech world – hardware and software. Both take plenty of time, planning, and resources to achieve a balance between analyzation and the actual act of maintenance.

MITS providers aim to detach enterprise systems from the old standard “break/fix” model. Rather than fixing issues as they arise, MITS providers continuously monitor your network’s health in order to prevent problems before they interrupt your business’ operations.

MITS providers will also offer personalized help desk services, which greatly increase your employee’s productivity; the benefit of utilizing a MITS help desk versus a generalized help desk is the familiarity with your business’ systems.

As your MITS partner keeps an eye on your enterprise ecosystem’s health, they will also monitor for any security risks, and on the opposite side of the IT coin, opportunities for advancement and growth.

When your system is upgraded before problems arise, not only do you reduce the cost of maintaining the system itself, you also increase the productivity of your business as a whole. Maintaining an enterprise ecosystem is akin to keeping a car running smoothly — preventative measures will always be more cost effective and quicker to implement when compared to fixing a broken system.

REDUCE TIME SPENT BUILDING AND FINANCING A TEAM

Tech is an industry that is constantly, continuously changing. In order to keep your internal IT department effective, up-to-date, and prepared for new security threats, training and education are a necessary, built-in cost to consider.

A MITS provider is there to help ease this burden; rather than slowing down your operations every year as your internal team learns about the new routes hackers are taking advantage of — or the new, holistic service put out by one of the many cloud providers — your MITS partner can keep your enterprise ecosystem running at 100% all the time.

REDUCE SECURITY RISKS

While we’re on the topic of hackers constantly finding new ways to infiltrate enterprise systems, let’s cover some of the ways a MITS provider can reduce your overall security risks.

MITS teams are responsible for monitoring and controlling operations that are essential to maintaining a safe, secure, and healthy enterprise system. Essentially, they will monitor your network’s health in order to stay on top of any high-latency connections or operations, in order to maintain an ecosystem that remains productive.

Additionally, a MITS team will monitor the entirety of your system for any security risks in real-time; looking for suspicious out-of-network connections, spikes in server operations that might denote DNS attacks, and continuously monitoring program and user states in order to stop any trojan horse hacking attempts before they begin. Much of this is automated, but upon the alert of any cyber attack attempt, your MITS team will be there to respond.

FIND A MITS PARTNER THAT UNDERSTANDS YOUR NEEDS

The most important aspect of any relationship — especially a professional one — is trust. You need to be able to trust that your MITS partner not only knows what they’re doing, but that they also know how to do it. If your MITS provider prescribes solutions without listening to your concerns for your business, or without looking into the operations that make your business run, they might not be the best fit for you. Always ask as many questions as possible, and keep an open line of communication with your provider. Your MITS partner will be happy to help.

For more about cyber security, check out our blog.