When the best isn't the best

I’ve been working with a small business who previously used a large, premium Managed Solutions Provider for their IT services. Consulting with the client on their past needs and expenses, it became obvious that while their needs were being met, that the solutions being provided were not tailored to the customers specific needs. As such, while I wouldn’t go as far as to say that the MSP was ripping off their customer, it was obvious that they had developed a stack of products and processes that were tailored to their typical business customer, in the 50-500 employee range, while being massively overbuilt for smaller businesses.

As one of many examples, the MSP wanted to develop a system image suited to the clients workstations, and push them on brand new workstations. A system image allows you to deploy a consistent application environment across many machines. This makes troubleshooting faster in complex software environments, since groups of systems share identical installation processes and software platforms. When you’re supporting 50+ computers for a university computer lab, having the ability to pull out a spare computer, and deploy it within a few hours is very powerful and convenient. But in the case of this particular customer, they only ran a few apps on their workstations that were easy to deploy, and patch consistently. As such, the time invested to develop an image was disproportionate to their needs. The intial deployment was quoted at roughly 40 hours, for a project that will take Aces IT Support LLC less than 20 to complete. The MSP’s system image will need to be updated from time to time to ensure it’s kept up to date, while I can deploy current software builds when needed, which in the case of this small office is rare. Why update a software image every year if you only deploy new systems for new employees every 2 years? Many application installations and configuration options can be automated and kept consistent in other ways such as Group Policy, that are more cost effective than a traditional system image. Sometimes the best, isn’t the best for you.

You need to ask yourself, do you want an IT provider that prioritizes what’s best for your specific needs, or who simply quotes out the same stack of products regardless of whether you’re a 500 employee national company, or a 10 employee small business? Just because something will get the job done, doesn’t mean it’s going to be the most cost effective solution for your business. Let large enterprise MSP’s serve large enterprises, and trust Aces IT Support LLC with your small business technology needs.