What is a Managed IT Service?
With the ever-increasing reliance on Technology in schools, Managed IT services are much more than a 3rd party fixing your laptops and servers when they break.
A Managed Service Provider (MSP) like MTS IT can proactively monitor, support, and maintain your entire IT network, providing regular audits, reports and assessments.
A Managed IT Service is designed to take the worry away from your school, helping to improve the classroom experience and streamline your processes, without compromising on reliability, security, performance or cost.
Why Do You Need Managed IT?
Focus on Teaching and Learning
The primary goal of your school is to provide the best learning environment for your students. A school with ageing, faulty technology causes both frustration to students trying to learn, and staff trying to teach.
A Managed IT Service eliminates the stress of resolving these technology issues, trusting an MSP like MTS IT to proactively monitor and fix issues, allowing you to focus on what matters – teaching and learning.
More Cost-effective Than a Dedicated IT Manager
Running dedicated in-house IT resources usually means at least a full-time IT Manager is needed, and sometimes a whole team of IT specialists.
The national average salary for an IT Manager alone is £51,289 per year in the United Kingdom (Data from Glassdoor 2022)
With a Managed IT Service, you pay a fraction of this cost and have access to a whole team of IT specialists.
Reliable Support With Redundancy
The education industry is host to specialist software, unique student policies and many high levels of dependency and security. You become reliant on your IT Manager to provide this, but inevitably they need a holiday from time to time, leaving you without the skills and support you need.
MSPs build their teams with failover and redundancy in mind, with multiple technicians, expert knowledge, and policies and procedures in place for when things don’t quite go to plan.
24/7 Assistance
Your IT infrastructure runs 24/7, but your IT Manager works 9 to 5. If a teacher works late on a Friday and can’t access their work files from home, it may have to wait until Monday.
MSPs have measures in place to fix and protect IT network’s in event of failure 24/7, often having dedicated staff on call in case of serious incidents.
All-inclusive Bill
You’ve paid the electric bill, the internet service provider, the server licences, and the email licences, but one thing slipped through the net. The domain name renewal and all your emails are now temporarily down.
Bills come in from different suppliers at different times for different amounts, and it’s often a headache keeping on top of everything.
An MSP can provide a single predictable monthly bill, so you know exactly how much you’re paying, and when it needs paying. No unexpected bills, costly maintenance fees, or expensive upgrade costs.
Proactive Monitoring
Proactive monitoring recognises when things aren’t quite as they’re meant to be and aims to resolve it automatically, or by alerting a technician. This often means problems are resolved before a user even notices a drop in performance.
Sophisticated monitoring can detect security threats as well, as performance drops, at the very early stages, intending to mitigate risk and downtime.
Increased Service Levels
With a team of industry experts, proactively monitoring and supporting 24/7, performance across the entire IT infrastructure undoubtedly improves.
Most MSPs provide high service level agreements (SLAs), guaranteeing that support requests and fixes are done on time.
Experts in School IT Running Your Network
Managed IT Services give you access to a team of highly skilled IT specialists. You may only need a particular skill once, so having this team as an extension of your own, instead of spending hundreds of pounds on training, can be invaluable.
In addition to this, MSPs like MTS IT offer expertise in the education industry as well as IT. Having experience in applying often complex corporate IT services to the teaching environment can be a challenge in itself. Having the right MSP with these skills means your school doesn’t just adapt but thrives in the ever-changing digital landscape.
Disaster Recovery & Continuity
Your IT Infrastructure is at the heart of your schools teaching and learning experience. Never has it been so important to deliver reliable and consistently high performance.
MSPs give that high level of resilience and redundancy through secure, remote-based systems, ensuring your network and your data are always safe.
Future Plan Your Technology Refresh
Having such a wide range of users in a school, along with heavy reliance on IT equipment, often means the technology becomes outdated, broken or obsolete far quicker than other industries. Having a technology refresh plan is vital to avoiding big repair or replacement bills.
A proactive MSP works closely with you to provide a clear technology refresh plan and overall IT strategy. This is then used to make informed decisions on new technology, ultimately leading to higher performance, cost savings, and an excellent teaching and learning environment.
