Addressing skills gaps with IT managed services 

In a Forbes survey, 93% of businesses stated that there is a gap in IT skills in the UK job market, with 42% of these businesses citing the fast pace of technological advancements as the leading cause. 

IT managed services are essential to empowering your IT teams with industry leading technology and fractional experts- and certainly do not replace them. When IT managed services and IT teams work in synergy, your business benefits from streamlined workflows, reduced overall IT costs, and increased operational resilience against threats.  

Your IT team is already overwhelmed. New threats, innovative technologies, and a talent shortage mean you are fighting a battle you cannot win alone. Leveraging third-party experts is essential to ensure your business is protected against advanced threats and benefits from the most innovative technology. The surge in modern technologies and innovations means that more niche specialisms must emerge, diversifying the nature of the tools used, which can lead to a skills gap among your current workforces. 

Here are some of the skills gaps that working with IT managed service providers can address and alleviate: 

Cyber security expertise 

By using a managed service provider to augment your cyber security capabilities, you benefit from fractional cyber security experts who are true specialists in safeguarding businesses against threats. Cyber threats aren't the only risk to your business- unfilled job vacancies and skills gaps pose significant challenges that can weaken your defenses. With a global shortage of 3.4 million experts, the question isn't just about how you should combat threats, but whether you have the right team to do so. This emphasises the crucial role of IT managed service providers in this short-staffed and business-critical area of IT.  

An added benefit of using a third party to bridge cyber security skills gaps is that they have no internal biases and can look at your systems objectively to find vulnerabilities that may otherwise go unnoticed. For example, businesses turn to managed service providers for: 

• Cyber security consultancy 

• Managed security incident and event management (Managed SIEM) 

• Managed detection and response (MDR) 

• Exposure management  

Infrastructure modernisation 

When evaluating how to meet both your business' and customers' needs, as well as drive digital transformation and infrastructure modernisation, many IT departments instinctively want to replace their systems. However, there is a smarter way to modernise, allowing you to evolve with minimal disruption.  By partnering with an experienced IT managed service provider, you can gradually modernise your systems by moving them to the cloud.  

For a single IT department to do this is a laborious, time-consuming, and costly endeavor. Many companies do not consider the hidden costs of doing this internally, including missed security patches, unexpected downtime, and unplanned maintenance.  

Whereas IT managed service providers are experienced in working alongside your internal teams to migrate to the cloud with minimal disruption to business as usual and IT workloads, proactively managed costs, and no need to completely overhaul your existing applications. 

Software licensing compliance 

Lost track of your software licences? That is not just wasted money- you may also be heading towards a compliance violation down the line. Once you lose visibility of your software licences, you are at risk of becoming non-compliant with licence agreements and wasting substantial money on underused software. Often, internal IT teams will turn to IT managed service providers to benefit from their expertise in this area, trusting them to: 

• Consolidate licences in one place- for better visibility 

• Automate processes like tracking licences, monitoring usage, and renewing licences 

• Negotiate considerable price reductions of software solutions with vendors 

This reduces IT teams’ workloads and eliminates the need to hire expensive software specialists. 

24/7 monitoring  

Even if your business is not open, your customers may need access to your systems 24/7. Often companies require manual intervention to recover in the event of a disaster, which can lead to costly downtime and interruption to your service. This is why organisations turn to IT managed service providers, so they can seamlessly implement 24/7 monitoring. 

Take our work with The State Hospital, for example. They struggled with establishing 24/7 resilience against threats or disruptions. 

 David Brammer, Senior IM&T Analyst at The State Hospital, stated: “In the past, dealing with any major hardware failure would require one of our IT team to get involved and manually switch over to our secondary site. We estimated that it could take us up to two hours to recover, causing delays in the transmission of vital information where it was needed, and potentially putting people at risk. Outside of normal business hours, this risk was magnified further.” 

We implemented data security and resilience solutions that allowed The State Hospital to implement a more agile disaster recovery strategy, with Brammer praising how our work “enables us to automatically bounce back in the event of a disaster, meaning business can continue as usual 24/7. This gives us huge peace of mind, allowing our staff to be confident of access to vital information at any time of day or night.” 

This list is by no means exhaustive- for instance, many organisations turn to managed service providers for data backup, hybrid cloud environments, and data centre services. The bottom line is, trying to hire additional IT staff will not solve your skills gap in the long run, given the constantly evolving nature of the IT landscape. The companies that thrive are not necessarily those with the largest IT teams; they are the ones that recognise the value of partnering with third-party experts to seamlessly bridge their IT skills gaps. Explore our full range of services here.