Play to Strengths to Close Gap Between Internal IT Teams and Your Vermont IT Services Team
Discover the advantages of using both your internal IT and a managed services provider to improve system security, play to core strengths and improve efficiency.
Email security is increasingly critical for businesses, especially given the growth of cyberattacks using email as the threat vector.
The challenge of keeping email secure becomes more complicated when you consider the inherent tension that can exist when an internal IT team has to work in tandem with an external managed services provider (MSP). What is the scope of the disconnect between internal and external teams and how can the gap be shrunk?
What Is the Disconnect of Internal IT Teams and MSPs?
A recent survey of 600 IT security professionals by Dimensional Research for Barracuda Networks showed that the issue of cyberattacks is pervasive. Among the key findings:
- 70 percent of companies were affected by a phishing attack. Of those attacked:
- 43 percent had to remove malware or viruses from networks
- 33 percent had credentials stolen
- 27 percent suffered reputational damage
- 20 percent had a direct monetary loss
- 17 percent had lost sensitive data
- 23 percent had an email attack that cost the organization more than $100,000
- 48 percent had a loss of employee productivity as a consequence of an attack
- 36 percent had a business disruption or downtime
Those stats appear dire, indicating a significant issue with email and network security. However, what's even more alarming is that internal IT teams did not seem concerned with the quality of their remediation work. Sixty-two percent rated their teams as very good or excellent at their ability to detect most attacks, with 35 percent rating themselves as adequate and just 3 percent described as inadequate.
How Do Internal IT Teams Feel About Working with an MSP?
When faced with the prospect of working with an external MSP, many internal IT teams can become protective, defensive or resentful. But adding an MSP's expertise to the talents of an internal team allow an organization to do even more with the technology stack.
Here are a few of the advantages of moving to a co-managed IT solution between internal staff and MSP employees, providing more security and instilling more confidence in your IT solution:
- Increased Security Focus. Some security breaches can be caused by overworked internal IT teams that miss an operating system upgrade or software update. If anti-virus updates are missed or network security protocols not followed, there's an increased risk of vulnerability and exposure. With a partnership, your MSP typically takes on the monitoring, updating and patching responsibilities that are designed to detect network intrusions, protect data and devices, and defend against cyberattacks.
- Faster Resolution. Internal IT departments often are challenged by the break-fix approach to maintaining devices and apps. This leads to inefficient support and resolution of issues. With an automated IT help-desk solution provided by your MSP, your user issues will be tracked, triaged and resolved remotely by experienced staff with the knowledge to resolve problems quickly.
- New Perspective. Many MSPs offer a complimentary IT assessment that can help inform strategic decisions. Use the fresh perspective to identify potential threats, weaknesses and security vulnerabilities.
- Better Migration and Onboarding. Your MSP has extensive experience migrating business systems from one provider to another. Leverage this expertise to address security issues in legacy systems.
- Fresh Eyes. With 24/7 network monitoring and the ticketing system and reporting, your MSP partner can give you insights and identify patterns that indicate a larger technology issue. Your MSP can recommend solutions that limit downtime for your hardware and software while focusing on security risks.
- Focus on Core Offerings. The internal team knows your business deeply. By getting them out of the black hole of break-fixes and updates, they can work instead on more strategic issues while your MSP addresses security needs.
- More Productivity. Often, companies have highly skilled and talented internal IT teams that are burdened with the routine and mundane tasks that are necessary, but not as inspiring. When you offload those tasks to an MSP, you can reallocate your internal IT talent to other tasks. There will be a net gain in productivity with the collective strengths put to bear on your work.
- Closed Skills Gaps. It's unlikely that an internal IT team will include specialists for every component of your IT. It's highly likely your MSP will have the talent to cover each area where you need IT support. Partnering gives your internal IT team the bandwidth to focus on their strengths.
- Short-Term Project Support. Short-term IT projects can provide your company with better tools and functionality. Yet these projects can often be slowed by the lack of capacity of an internal team.
The divide between internal IT teams and your MSP can be closed quickly, with each side seeing the partnership as a win-win.