We constantly refer to ourselves as an MSP. What exactly is an MSP and are all MSP’s equal ?

The term MSP seems to have been generated by us IT folk. It stands for Managed Service Provider, meaning more than the traditional IT support company. As an MSP the company will not just react to your IT issues and fix them they will be proactive. They may also include tools to backup and protect your systems, these may or may not include Anti Virus Software, Spam filtering.

As each MSP decides what tools they will include in their offering the prices charged per MSP are usually built on a per user model. The prices offered by MSP’s can be very different and range from £10 per user per month up to £100 per user per month. We come in at a cost of £45 per user per month. We include within that SPAM filtering, Office 365 subscription, monitoring, patch management, anti-virus, backups to name just a few features. Obviously this is backed with our support desk from when things slip through the net.

Why do MSP’s have different offerings and how do i compare?

MSP’s refer to the collection of products they offer and apply to your systems as their stack. These stacks could have lower quality components than others, such as Anti-Virus DNS filtering etc. There are multiple vendors offering AV. The cost of this varies a lot some MSP’s prefer one vendor than an other. Tthis could be due to the management interface, past experience of capture of a Virus etc. The same applies to DNS filtering backups solutions and all affects there buy in and sell out price.

The only true way to compare one from another is to get a full detailed list of all the services their stack includes. Compare this with another, i.e. to ensure that both companies are offering DNS filtering / PC Backup, SharePoint backups mail box backups retention policy.