Continuing our blog series on IT Monitoring (see Part One, Part Two), we take a look at some of the business drivers and internal IT challenges behind the decision to outsource IT monitoring to a managed services provider.
Downtime … it is the curse of every business operation. One single power outage, equipment failure or security flaw can lead to significant financial loss and drop in productivity. There comes a point in every business operation where IT decision makers need to pause and ask: “Does it make better sense to let the experts handle our IT monitoring and management across multiple locations to ensure better uptime and network performance?”
Why Choose a Managed Services Provider?
Keeping your IT network humming at peak performance is a 24/7/365 job. If your IT staff is always in a reactive mode fighting network issues as they happen rather than preventing them from happening in the first place, then outsourcing your IT monitoring and management can make a world of difference.
What are signs indicating you may be falling short in proactively monitoring your IT network?
- Too much downtime caused by unforeseen issues
- Limited or no visibility into your IT network environment
- Slow response to address network issues or critical incidents
- Reactive alerting and troubleshooting problems before they impact the organization
- IT staff bogged down with too much workload in daily operations
Managed service providers can provide centralized visibility into your entire network environment. Monitoring agents are installed on servers, routers, firewalls, switches and applications to correlate data and alert our IT engineers in real time when monitored devices dip below health and performance baselines.
Costs Savings Are Another Consideration
Building a compliant 24/7/365 IT network monitoring operation in-house can be costly. Let’s look at the costs of implementing a typical security monitoring operation center as an example.
Staff + Technology = Total Cost
Security Employees
24x7x365 Coverage
$550,000 total cost for a Security Architect, a Security Analyst and five Tier 1 SOC Analysts.
8×5 Coverage
$250,000 total cost for a Security Architect and a Security Analyst.
Technology
$30,000 per year – Cloud-based governance risk and compliance software
$20,340 per year – Cloud-based security information and event management
$14,400 per year – Cloud-based Cisco Umbrella DNS Security = MSRP $4.00 x 300 machines per month
$10,800 per year – Endpoint security = 3.00 x 300 machines per month
$9,000 per year – Endpoint threat hunting = $2.50 x 300 machines per month
$2,500 per year – Cloud-based security information and event management
Total Annual Cost
In-House Employees + Technology
24/7/365 Coverage
$637,040 before benefits, taxes and other expenses
8×5 Coverage
$337,040 before benefits, taxes and other expenses
Managed Services Provider
In contrast, save 66% on total annual cost teaming with a managed services provider.
24/7/365 Coverage
$217,392 for all services proposed
8×5 Coverage
$119,648 for all services proposed
It’s Time to Make the Move – Partner with a Winning Team
Tired of playing defense with your network monitoring challenges? Want to be on the offense? Team with Magna5 to proactively ensure consistent uptime with fully managed, real-time monitoring and quick response to improve network reliability. We have rapid response engineers who watch your organization’s infrastructure around the clock to ensure the health of the network environment meets pre-defined service levels. We will identify, validate and respond to issues before they become large downtime events.
