Keeping up with business expenses is a challenge for most small to medium-sized companies, and complexity is increased with each vendor added to the list of payees. Partnering with a managed service provider (MSP) can help streamline your accounting. 

Working with an MSP is a good start

The benefits of partnering with an MSP for any company are numerous. Along with simplifing operations and enhancing productivity, partnering with a managed service provider (MSP) helps your company in two important ways: mitigating IT-related expenses and controlling costs through a monthly consolidated billing that covers cloud and other IT services.

An MSP allows you to have one uniform bill to pay each month. It avoids a scenario like having to pay Microsoft for Office 365, a phone company, and a cloud provider like Amazon AWS. It’s one payment, made monthly, with no surprises or unexpected expenses. Plus, there is only one check to write, to your MSP, not to a multitude of entities. 

Moving it one step further 

Matt Mehler, VP at VirtuWorks, believes one of the greatest advantages of working with an MSP is reducing the complexities that come with dealing with and paying multiple service providers. “Regardless of an organization’s size, an MSP can provide an essential one-stop service that allows the company to obtain effective IT solutions from a single source”

One area he sees immediate simplification is in the consolidation of cloud services under a single provider. Today some organizations believe they should invest in a multi-cloud solution. They use Microsoft Office 365 for productivity and AWS for storage. But by using Microsoft’s Azure, they can eliminate the additional billing that comes with Amazon’s cloud and gain compatibility between systems and services.

The simple fact is that a majority of businesses run on Microsoft Office and use other Microsoft products. These services can be bought individually, bundled, or obtained through an MSP. So why do so many companies look to AWS for their cloud services? Just like MS Office leads the market in productivity software, AWS has lead the market in cloud services, but the latest generation of Azure service offer a strong case to make the switch.

By consolidating under Microsoft, you gain several advantages: 

  • Azure on top of an existing MS system generally provides a more feature-rich experience
  • Azure offers a variety of compliance protections, including over 10,000 Microsoft patents to protect your company
  • Most innovative container offerings with more than 100 services – Whether you are looking for mobile apps, Web apps, API apps or just about anything else, you can find it on Azure already.

Conclusion

There is a very simple benefit, a recurring one, the simplicity of only paying one bill a month and having a software suite that works together seamlessly.