What is Managed Services?

Managed services is the practice of outsourcing the responsibility for maintaining, and anticipating need for a range of processes and functions in order to improve operations and cut expenses. It is an alternative to the break/fix or on-demand outsourcing model where the service provider performs on-demand services and bills the customer only a fix subscription fees.

Under this subscription model, the client or customer is the entity that owns or has direct oversight of the organization or system being managed whereas the Managed Services Provider (MSP) is the service provider delivering the managed services. The client and the MSP are bound by a contractual, service-level agreement (SLA) that states the performance and quality metrics of their relationship.