Reading Time: 2 minutes

Ensuring the availability of IT services requires monitoring capabilities and resources to resolve issues. But in a large enterprise, it can take years of experience to determine what to monitor and the alarm thresholds for creating tickets that quickly alert the appropriate resources when issues occur.

In many cases, this requires 24×7 monitoring and management, multiple tiers of support, redundant architecture and resources to continually patch, maintain, test and upgrade releases of monitoring and ITSM software. Building these capabilities in-house represents a more-than-significant investment and is one reason managed services is quickly becoming a necessity.

When evaluating managed services providers, determining the differences among them isn’t easy. To help, here’s a high-level checklist for identifying those among the top performers:

  1. Depth of Expertise: Examine the length of time the provider has offered managed services, whether the support team is solely dedicated to this task, how many engineers and tiered levels of support they offer, and whether they base success on target response times or target resolution times.
  1. Proven Operational Rigor: Managed services should be built on ITSM toolsets so when device issues occur, an alarm is generated and an advanced algorithm automatically prioritizes incident resolution. All the service descriptions, alarm thresholds, policies and processes have to be built—something a leading managed services provider will have already done so you won’t need to start from scratch—saving considerable time, effort and money.
  1. Recognition of Service Excellence: Explore what others say about the managed services provider: Have they earned industry accolades? Are they receiving vendor certification and training? Look for a track record of success and proof the provider consistently performs at a high level.

To further help you evaluate potential managed services providers, Logicalis has created a downloadable checklist of the most important features to consider. Be sure to check it out today—where we now live in an always-on society, utilizing managed services is just about mandatory.

And after all, utilizing managed services is the best way to ensure compute, storage and network resources are available around the clock to support your mission-critical workloads.