IT Infrastructure Managed Services: Finding The Best Partner

As organisations grow, so does the complexity of their IT infrastructure and systems. More employees, devices, applications, networks, servers, and data mean more management.

Without proper oversight, even minor problems can spiral into major headaches, such as downtime, data loss, or security breaches.

Trying to handle escalating IT demands in-house can stretch resources thin. Many organisations simply can't afford to hire, train, and retain skilled IT staff needed to support today's dynamic tech environments.

That's where outsourcing IT management to a managed service provider (MSP) can help.

IT managed services involves an MSP taking responsibility for some or all of a client's IT operations. It frees time for the client's in-house IT staff to focus on more strategic initiatives that drive business objectives.

With so many MSPs to choose from, you must select one that's a good fit for your organisation.

Established MSPs like Netcon Technologies (that’s us) have a proven track record of 17 years in helping clients achieve IT success. Netcon takes a proactive approach to managing complex infrastructure, security, cloud solutions, and more.

In this article, we share in-depth about MSPs, their benefits, and the factors you should consider when selecting one. Alongside this, we also share how Netcon stands out as a trusted MSP partner for strategic IT management.

Do you want to outsource IT infrastructure management and focus on your core business activities? You can book a consultation call here or drop us an email, and we’ll get back to you.

Assess the IT Needs of Your Organisation

Before you decide whether you want to work with an MSP, the first step is to assess your current IT infrastructure. Let’s see how you can do that.

Conduct a Thorough Audit

Perform a thorough audit and answer questions like:

• Does my current IT tech stack meet my business needs

• Is it allowing me to fully help my clients and customers?

• Is it enhancing the productivity of my employees, or do they think it’s a bottleneck??

If your answer is yes to all the above questions, your current IT setup works for you. You can just look to fill in the small gaps and move on. Incremental upgrades will work for you and help you increase your pace of work.

But if your answer is no, you may need an IT refresh. It starts by highlighting the shortcomings.

What exactly holds your operations back? It can be dated servers, low-bandwidth network architecture, legacy hardware, end-of-life components, and more.

Assess your network and its efficiency. See if it can handle the traffic your current operations and processes generate. Also, check if it’ll serve you well a few years down the line. Estimate your growth figures and ask the IT team to analyse them.

Next, scalability. As your business grows, the technology needs to grow with it to match the increased needs.

That's when you check if your IT infrastructure is scalable. If yes, how much of it is scalable? You can answer that question by checking how modular the components of your current setup are. If you find them difficult to scale, highlight the factors responsible for that hindrance.

Once you do this in-depth audit, you need to quantify your IT infrastructure’s performance.

Identify the Performance Metrics

You can measure how well or poorly your IT infrastructure performs using metrics. The ones listed below are the most important.

1. Network bandwidth utilisation

It’ll tell you the exact utilisation figures of the available bandwidth by your applications and systems. Assuming that your network bandwidth capacity is 40Gbps, and the systems at full load utilise 39 or 39.5Gbps, you should definitely upgrade the network backbone with higher bandwidth.

2. CPU/Server usage

It’s similar to network bandwidth. Look for the percentage of CPU power used in daily work scenarios. If that number is anywhere around 60-70%, there's still some performance overhead. You shouldn’t wait until those numbers hit 90% or higher. The chances of outages and downtimes will be much higher.

The best practice for network and server utilisation is to keep the sustained loads between 60-70%. That way, you won’t have to worry about frequent downtimes.

3. Availability and uptime

The higher the number, the better the infrastructure and its calibration.

4. Frequency of errors

There can be many errors in an IT environment - network errors, server errors, software bugs, and more. We usually measure the frequency of errors as the Mean Time Between Failures or MTBF. We measure it differently for hardware and software components.

The higher this time in hours, the lesser the frequency of errors. It signifies a well-set IT environment with higher reliability and stability.

5. Response time and latency

Some tools measure these for you. They check how much time the system takes to complete a request. The processing time to complete the request is the response time. Latency is the time a data packet takes to travel through the network between its source and destination.

We measure both these metrics in milliseconds. In an enterprise environment, you should aim for a response time of 1 second or lower and a latency of 10-50 ms.

So, uptil now, we’ve conducted an audit and we’ve measured how well our IT infrastructure performs. Another important factor is to check about our security.

Evaluate Security Practices

Cyber attacks have become excessively frequent. 33 billion accounts were breached in 2023. That translates to 97 cybercrime victims per hour. It’s not about security and recovery strategies IF a cyberattack happens. It’s about when a cyberattack will happen. And when it does, we must have strategies to protect our data and operations.

Data Backup and Disaster Recovery

Evaluate your data backup policies and check if you’re backing up your data regularly. Also, a common mistake is not examining the data at the backup site and verifying if it matches the original data.

The disaster recovery plan will give you clear instructions on the plan of action to restore operations to normal in case of a breach or an attack.

Is your plan thorough and detailed? Have you tested it to see if it works?

Disaster recovery comes into the picture in case of a catastrophic disruption of the operations or emergencies.

Incident Response

Incident response is how your team rapidly fixes a security issue or creates a work-around. Most organizations have some sort of incident response plans ready so that teams can get into action. However, to evaluate your plan and make the best use of it, answer questions like:

• Have you tested your incident response?

• Was it effective?

• How much time did it take to restore the services?

• Did it have a significant business impact?

Small-scale operational issues and downtimes that are not widespread, like disk corruption or database outages, come under the incident response plan.

Cyber Security Measures

To strengthen your cybersecurity measures, validate whether you have:

• An Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) in place (This helps you continuously monitor your endpoints)

• Have created access controls

• Set up firewalls

• Segmented networks

• Web application firewall and intrusion detection systems

Remember, it’s not enough to just have basic firewalls. You need to have advanced solutions to thwart ransomware attacks and maintain regulatory standards like HIPAA.

That’s why, such a holistic audit is important. If conducting such an expansive and extensive audit seems too overwhelming, Netcon can do it for you.

We can be your trusted consultant, highlight the gaps, and provide you with a complete audit report. Contact us to learn more about our IT infrastructure consulting services.

Now that you've covered the audit and identified the areas of improvement, you need to choose an MSP who can help you manage and upkeep your IT infrastructure.

Factors To Consider While Selecting an MSP

Let us look at the factors we believe are the most important to consider while selecting an MSP.

Specificity of the SLAs

SLAs or Service Level Agreements are the formal agreements between the MSP and the client about the benchmarks or levels of services promised by the MSP.

They need to be as detailed and specific as possible, highlighting all the possible scenarios the MSP is responsible for and the ones that the MSP isn't responsible for.

Let’s say the MSP has promised 99.95% uptime for your servers. That translates to less than 36 minutes of downtime per month. A faulty OS update brings the servers down for more than an hour - exceeding the limit set in the SLA.

Now, despite the MSP doing their best to find turnarounds, they cannot be held responsible for that downtime. Check for such specifics in the SLAs. This clarity is vital to avoid conflicts and misunderstandings down the line.

At Netcon, our team continuously works with you to refine the SLAs for your niche demands. We know the scenarios that may unfold and list them in great detail in our SLAs that are specific to your organisation.

We’ll have strict SLAs for your applications that face your customers or clients and are business-critical. Those must be running no matter what, or they’ll negatively impact your business.

Assess the Experience of the Vendor in Similar Industries

Experience in handling large-scale projects of high complexity is something you should look for in an MSP.

Nobody wants their digital backbone to be an experimental ground for a new, inexperienced vendor.

What experience does Netcon have as an MSP?

We’ve handled large-scale and complex projects like Bangalore International Airport, Mumbai International Airport, IIMK, Textbook Corporation, and more. We can handle the scale, complexity as well as diversity of technology. We’ve handled cloud migrations, O&M projects, greenfield data centre setups, and more.

We’ve 2,00,000+ hours of consulting experience and over 300+ projects. We’ve set up and handled IT infrastructure for 15+ airports in India.

24*7 Monitoring and Support

Business critical errors can cost you immensely. That’s why you need to continuously monitor your infrastructure with instant support when something goes wrong. Evaluate the support and monitoring policies of the vendor before signing them as your MSP.

Most MSPs won’t provide you with round-the-clock support. And if they do, they’d probably not do it for you.

Netcon has a a 24*7 support policy for all your business-critical applications and infrastructure. We can create custom support policies for you based on your requirements. And with our Network Operations Centre(NOC) and Security Operations Centre(SOC), our team constantly keeps an eye on your infrastructure.

Next, let’s look at the cost.

Analyse the Costs and Value Proposition

How extensive the SLAs are and what services you need from the MSP will determine their costs. Adding SLAs and services will have a direct impact on the cost. Be transparent about it beforehand. Ask the MSP about their pricing structure and how they’ll accept payments.

Evaluate the Total Cost of Ownership

When you do the IT infrastructure management internally, many factors add to the cost - skilled personnel, timely upgrades, fixing the errors, regular maintenance, network management, servers and storage management and more.

But, as you move to an MSP, these costs should go down while increasing the efficiency and performance of your infrastructure. They should help you cut costs and reduce the wastage of resources.

If you draw a table of your projections of costs before and after moving to an MSP over the next 3 or 5 years, MSP should save you money.

Netcon gives you the option of pay-as-you-go monthly, like a Netflix subscription. We promise up to 41% increased efficiency, 25% reduced wastage, and 65% faster decision-making with our insights.

We also have a SOC and NOC with a dedicated team of experts that monitor your network performance and cybersecurity alerts round the clock, 24*7.

Okay, you've analysed everything and finalised the vendor. Then comes the onboarding part.

Seamless Transition and Onboarding

When you choose Netcon as your MSP and move your infrastructure management from your internal team or previous MSP to Netcon’s team, we transition and take over your IT infrastructure management with the help of our transition experts.

First, our transition experts will understand the scale and complexity of transition. They’ll check for compatibility with the tech.

Then, they’ll create a 30/60/90 day transition plan. It can take longer as well. Some transitions may take 6 months or more. This plan will direct the team about the technologies that'll be transitioned first, second and so on.

Phased Onboarding With Minimum Downtime

With a transition plan ready, the team will transition and take over the management in three phases.

Phase one: Observing

For the initial part of the transition, we’ll observe the team that previously managed your IT infrastructure. We’ll patiently learn from them and understand the intricacies and nuances of your infrastructure.

Phase two:- Managing, but with assistance

After we’ve learned your infrastructure and are confident enough to handle it, we start managing it while the previous team assists us whenever needed. It ensures hands-on experience, learning and familiarity with the components.

Phase three:- Managing independently while the previous team observes

Once we’re fully up to speed with your infrastructure, we’ll manage it independently while the previous team observes us. That way, if we are making some errors, they can catch them early. So before they hand it over to our team, we’ll understand your infrastructure inside-out.

This phased transition and onboarding process reduces the chances of errors and meltdowns while ensuring minimum downtime.

Data Migration and Transfer Protocols

Data is precious. Be thorough with the data-handling policies and encryption protocols before asking an MSP to handle it.

Verify their data integrity measures, access controls, and so on. Also, assess their disaster recovery and business continuity plans.

Netcon signs strict NDAs while handling data.

We disable all external data transfer devices like USBs on the systems during the migration or transfer period.

It includes constantly monitoring and scanning the emails going out of that domain, and physical devices like USB and external SSDs to ensure no leakage of data. On top of all these, we’ll install EDR to alert us if an unauthorised person tries to access or transfer data.

Now that you’re set up with migration and data transfer protocols, we focus on maintaining, improvising and fine-tuning the setup.

How Can You Continuously Improve and Innovate Your IT Infrastructure?

If you’re handing over the complete end-to-end management of your infrastructure to an MSP, only then does this aspect come into the picture.

It’ll also depend on the SLAs that you’ve agreed upon. With all that said, why should you continuously improve and innovate your infrastructure?

Without it, your infrastructure will become obsolete. Every few years, there are updates to the software and the hardware components. Software is easy to update. But upgrading hardware is challenging. There are a lot of other components dependent on it.

If Netcon is responsible for your end-to-end IT infrastructure management, how will we do it?

• We’ll first analyse what components are nearing their end-of-life(EOL) period.

• Then, we’ll come to the rest of the components, group them in buckets and phase them for the next five years, factoring in their age and upcoming upgrade cycles.

• Our team will then calculate the costs of upgrades over the next 5 years of all the components and add them to the tally of total costs.

While continuous improvement is great, what about sustaining the performance?

Conduct Regular Performance Reviews

All is smooth sailing, and one day, you get an alert from the server monitoring tool that you've reached the maximum server capacity.

Surely, it’s an anomaly. Such anomalies, errors and sudden dips in performance can halt your business-critical applications.

To avoid that, conduct regular reviews with your MSP.

• Set a schedule for these reviews and evaluations

• Consider and discuss the business impact and technical impacts of dips and errors

• Establish Key Performance Indicators(KPIs) and see if the MSP meets them.

• Check if the MSP is following the recommended best practices.

At Netcon, KPIs vary from domain to domain and industry to industry. But one solid way of measuring the performance is how quickly we can make a service go live.

The current infrastructure is set. Let’s move on to emerging technologies and future-proofing.

How Your MSP Can Help You Access Emerging Technologies and Plan With Future-Proofing Strategies

MSP now manages your IT infrastructure. A huge load is off your head.

So, as a Head of IT, your focus should be on mapping the future plans - highlight the emerging technology that can benefit your business and plan on when and how to integrate it into your current setup.

If you have signed an SLA for this, the expertise and experience of an MSP like Netcon, who has 17+ years of experience, can guide you to make the right decisions. You can future-proof your infrastructure without breaking a sweat.

Here’s how Netcon can help you.

• Our experts constantly update themselves. They’ll give you regular updates about the developments in relevant tech.

• Our team will discuss with you how upcoming innovations can benefit your business.

• We’ll present you with the best possible ways to integrate new tech into your infrastructure, in a seamless and cost-efficient manner.

All this is great. But it’s worthless if you can’t get the necessary support from your MSP in a crisis situation.

Client Support and Communication Channels

If your MSP fails to support you and doesn’t communicate promptly, no matter how skilled and experienced their team is, it’ll all go down the drain.

We cannot emphasise enough the importance of prompt support and proper communication channels.

It’s a huge factor when deciding on an MSP. Please ensure that the MSP has a good track record of providing timely and effective support to their clients. Evaluate their communication and escalation protocols thoroughly.

How Netcon Supports Its Clients

Most MSPs could take around half a day or day to respond to your issues. And even if they do, some junior-level support staff will handle your issues and give you a template response.

Netcon promises its first response to its client within 15 to 30 minutes after you've raised the issue. You can reach our support team via chatbot, email or the helpdesk.

Based on your SLA, we assign the issue to its priority category. P1 are the highest priority issues that our team will start addressing immediately. P2 issues are a little less severe than P1, but we take them just as seriously. P3 are minor issues that can be addressed leniently, as per the set SLAs.

We have a hierarchical escalation process. If the support staff cannot resolve your issue within the time frame set in the SLA, you can escalate it all the way to the C-level executives.

We stand out from the rest because of our customer-first attitude. Our longstanding relations with our clients are a testament to that.

Speaking of long-lasting relations, aim to build a long-term partnership with your MSP.

Build a Long-Term Partnership With Your MSP

With a long-term partnership with your MSP, their team will understand your business and environment better. They'll optimise it in a way that’ll suit your operations, and overall, it’ll be a win-win situation for both.

But to stay committed for the long term will demand clarity on these points.

• Examine contract flexibility and scalability options

• Negotiate exit strategies and data ownership terms

• Ensure alignment of long-term IT goals and business objectives

• Establish a proactive relationship for future success

Netcon has been the IT infrastructure partner of Bangalore International Airport for the last 7 years. During that period, we have executed 6 different technology and networking projects for them.

We’ve also been the trusted technology partner of ELGI Equipments since 2012.

Choose Netcon as your IT Infrastructure MSP

Netcon has domain expertise in various technologies, with experience in managing and executing high-complexity projects at scale. For example, we automated the irrigation system for the bells and veils plants at the T2 terminal of Bangalore International Airport. We have more than 300 certified professionals for different domains. Our NOC and SOC are state-of-the-art with 24*7 proactive monitoring.

We take pride in delivering tailored solutions and support to our clients, ensuring that our services align perfectly with their business needs and operations.

If you’re looking for a managed service provider, Netcon can help. Book a call with us to speak to one of our experts.