A managed services provider, or MSP, is a company that runs your organization's IT for a flat recurring fee: the help desk your staff calls, the security tooling on your devices, the backups, the patching, and the planning. The "managed" part is the point. Instead of paying someone to fix things after they break, you pay a team to keep them from breaking and to answer for the whole system.
What does a managed services provider actually do?
Day to day, six things. A staffed help desk your people contact when something does not work. Monitoring and patching that catches issues before anyone notices them. Security: endpoint protection, email defense, identity and access controls, and user training. Backup and recovery, including proving that restores actually work. Vendor management, so your internet provider, phone system, and software vendors have one accountable front door. And advisory: budgets, roadmaps, and guidance when a bigger decision comes up.
A good one also documents everything. Every device, account, application, and configuration, written down where the whole team can see it, so support starts with context instead of twenty questions. Whether a provider documents your environment, and who owns that documentation if you leave, tells you more about them than any brochure.
How is an MSP different from break-fix IT support?
Break-fix means you call when something breaks and pay by the hour. The incentives run backwards: the provider earns more when you have more problems, and you hesitate to call because every call costs money, so small issues get reported late and grow into outages.
A managed services provider charges the same flat amount whether you call once or forty times. Prevention becomes their profit motive. When ETTE moved to this model, the logic was plain: one flat monthly fee per user means we earn more by fixing things fast and keeping them fixed, not by billing the meter.
What do the related acronyms mean?
- MSP: managed services provider, the general-purpose IT partner described above.
- MSSP: managed security services provider, a specialist focused only on security operations. Many MSPs, ETTE included, build managed security into the base service instead of selling it separately.
- Co-managed IT: an MSP working alongside your internal IT staff under a clear division of duties, rather than replacing them.
- vCIO and vCISO: virtual chief information officer and virtual chief information security officer. Fractional executive leadership from the provider: technology roadmaps and budgets from the vCIO, risk and compliance ownership from the vCISO.
How do managed services providers charge?
Most price per user per month; some price per device, and a few still bill hourly, which is break-fix wearing a subscription label. Per user is the model to prefer, because it maps cost to headcount and covers however many devices each person uses.
Few providers publish their rates. ETTE does: fully managed IT from $150 per user per month, remote-only from $125, nonprofit rates on every plan, and Virtual CIO advisory listed at $2,500 per month as an add-on. Published or not, the number only means something next to what it includes, which is covered in what outsourced IT support costs and what should be included.
Do you need an MSP, internal IT, or both?
Headcount is the honest guide. Under roughly 75 people, a managed plan usually costs less than one internal hire and buys a full team instead of a single point of failure. Past that size, or when your operations are specialized enough to need a full-time person, the question becomes both: an internal lead who knows the organization, plus a co-managed provider supplying capacity, after-hours security coverage, and specialists no one person can be.
The wrong answer at any size is one administrator with every password and no documentation. Organizations discover the cost of that arrangement on that person's last day.
How do you evaluate a managed services provider?
Ask for response objectives in writing; ETTE publishes 20 minutes for urgent issues, 60 for high priority. Ask how onboarding works and what gets documented; a provider who changes things before documenting your environment is guessing. Ask whether backups get restore-tested. Ask about exit terms, because confident providers do not lock the door. And ask for client references in your sector, since a provider fluent in, say, nonprofit budgets and board reporting will serve a nonprofit better than a generalist with a bigger office.
ETTE has been a managed services provider for nonprofits, associations, and small businesses since 2002, headquartered in Washington, DC with remote coverage nationwide. The services overview shows how the pieces fit together, and the readiness assessment is a short self-check for leaders deciding whether managed IT is the right move at all.