What are managed IT services?

Managed services are tasks handled by a third party―called a managed service provider (MSP)―often in the context of business IT services. Offloading managed IT services to an expert helps reduce costs, improve service quality, and free up internal resources.

The third party that delivers services is called a managed service provider. A managed IT service provider is most often an IT service provider that manages and assumes responsibility for providing a defined set of business technology services to its clients, either proactively or as the MSP (not the client) determines that services are needed.

The managed service provider is responsible for the functionality of the service or equipment, managed under a service level agreement (SLA). The SLA will contain provisions for typical downtime, disaster recovery, technical support, and help desk operations. The customer receiving the service often pays a monthly subscription fee. 

Organizations outsource the responsibility for maintaining—and anticipating the IT needs for—a range of processes and functions in order to improve operations, cut expenses, and streamline IT management.

Managed IT services are beneficial for both large organizations and small businesses; new companies and established ones. Some of the benefits of using managed services include:

• Filling the skills gap. Managed services can be good for teams that don’t have the time, skills, or experience internally to manage certain business functions on their own, or choose to focus their efforts on other initiatives. Relying on an expert to provide a service allows your teams to focus on innovation without getting bogged down in routine tasks.
• Cost savings. Many managed services are tied to variable cloud expenses. These services can save you money on staff and training. Pricing for other managed services is usually included in a fixed monthly charge. Engaging a managed service company instead of building in-house IT operations can be cheaper and the costs can be more predictable, which is helpful for budgeting.
• Reliability. You can worry less about outages because the managed service provider is responsible for keeping the service available at all times. Services and IT support are provided under an SLA, so it is clear what to expect and when to expect it. An in-house IT team is often juggling multiple responsibilities but an MSP can focus on perfecting delivery of their specific service. This means focusing on the health and security of the service, applying patches and upgrades as needed.

Managed IT services can range from general to specific, depending on your needs. Common services can include the monitoring and maintenance of equipment, IT systems management, remote monitoring and management of servers, network monitoring, and other support services.

The traditional approach to managed services is a break/fix model which monitors systems until there is a problem to remediate. Many modern managed service providers take a more proactive approach to maintenance and management, which can include patch management and predictive maintenance. 

Cloud-based managed services can range from specific applications delivered "as a service" (Software as a Service, or SaaS) to platforms and infrastructure as a service (IaaS and PaaS). These services can help businesses scale rapidly to meet increasing demand without the associated datacenter and IT infrastructure costs. Cloud-based services can also provide greater access to data, analytics, and storage.

Other companies provide managed security services for both traditional bare metal infrastructure and cloud services. Having reliable and trusted security experts is especially important to companies with hybrid cloud infrastructure.

The phrase "managed IT services" sometimes appears alongside other terms like "cloud services," but what’s the difference?

Cloud services are software offerings managed by vendors and delivered to customers on demand. Cloud services generally include vendor management of application, data, and platform services, but usually don't include management of the customer workload itself, whereas managed IT service providers typically provide the cloud platform on which their service is delivered as part of their service. 

Red Hat® Cloud Services include hosted and managed platform, application, and data services that accelerate time to value and reduce the operational cost and complexity of delivering cloud-native applications to end users. Organizations can confidently build and scale applications with a streamlined experience across services and across clouds while Red Hat manages the rest.

Red Hat’s cloud services comprise a platform for developing, deploying, and scaling cloud-native applications in open hybrid cloud environments. The combination of enterprise-grade Kubernetes, cloud-native approach to application delivery, and managed operations allows enterprise development teams to increase application velocity and focus on core competencies.

• Platform services are hosted application platforms. Red Hat’s managed platform services include:
  • Red Hat OpenShift® Dedicated
  • Azure Red Hat OpenShift
  • Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS
  • Red Hat Openshift on IBM Cloud
• Application services are on-demand services that can be used to build and connect applications. Red Hat offers a full portfolio of application services. In addition, many of these application services are available specifically for Red Hat OpenShift:
  • Red Hat Application Services portfolio
  • Red Hat OpenShift application services
• Data services provide on-demand data access, storage, prep, and/or analysis.
  • Red Hat OpenShift AI is an AI-focused portfolio that provides tools across the full lifecycle of AI/ML experiments and models and includes Red Hat OpenShift Data Science.
  • Red Hat OpenShift Data Science is a cloud service for data scientists and developers of intelligent applications.