What Is an MSP (Managed Service Provider)?
The company that runs and secures your technology, explained without the jargon.
An MSP, or managed service provider, is a company that takes ongoing responsibility for running and securing your business technology under a contract, rather than fixing things one incident at a time. When people say "our IT company," they usually mean an MSP.
What an MSP is responsible for
A good MSP owns the day-to-day health of your environment: monitoring systems, applying updates, answering user questions, managing security tools, keeping backups working, and coordinating with your other technology vendors. Most also provide strategic guidance, so you have someone planning next year's upgrades instead of reacting to this year's failures. What an MSP does every day goes deeper on the routine work you never see.
MSP vs break/fix vs internal IT
- Break/fix shop: you call when something breaks and pay by the hour. No monitoring, no planning.
- Internal IT: employees on your payroll. Great control, but one or two people cannot cover help desk, security, projects and vacations.
- MSP: a whole team, with tooling and 24/7 coverage, for a flat monthly fee. Many companies pair an MSP with a small internal team, which is called co-managed IT.
What "managed" really means
The word matters. A provider that only responds to tickets is a help desk, not a managed service provider. Managed means the provider is accountable for outcomes: fewer outages, fewer security incidents, and systems that stay aligned to a standard. At Mentis Group, that standard is a framework of more than 350 technical and security controls that our Technology Alignment Engineers audit on a recurring schedule.
How to tell a good one from a bad one
Ask how they prevent problems, not just how fast they respond. Ask which security framework they align to (NIST and CIS are the common ones), how they document your environment, and what their staff turnover looks like. There is a full list in how to choose an MSP.
Mentis Group has been an MSP since 2001, headquartered in Dallas with offices in Fort Worth and Houston. You can read more about the company on our About Us page and about the program itself under Fully Managed IT. For the full definition of the service, see what are managed IT services.
Have a question about your own environment? Schedule a consultation with Mentis Group or call (866) 901-7808.