So, you’ve made the smart decision of investing in expert Managed Service Providers (MSPs) to delegate your IT operations, focus on your core business, and enable you to be a few more steps ahead of the competition. The next steps would be about knowing which provider of IT solutions in California you should entrust your business to.

Consulting your trusted IT support in-house team is a given; after all, they must be comfortable in working with your chosen IT partner. However, you must also equip yourself with the knowledge and the practical know-how to ensure that you will make the soundest choice.

At Amucomp Solutions, your leading provider of IT service in Montebello, California, we like transparency. As such, we advocate for comprehensive research before entrusting your business to your chosen third-party managed IT service organization.

We advise that you begin with knowing the terminologies used in this line of work, especially since the industry is fond of acronyms that just means the same thing. For instance, a Managed Services Provider (MSP) can also be called Managed Network Services (MNS) provider or the older term, Office Technology Provider.

These said, starting here will help you thoroughly understand the services you are about to enlist and direct your concerns you didn’t know you had by asking the right questions.

Here are some of the key terms in MSP and their definitions you must know:

• Managed IT Services Provider (MSP)
  This refers to the IT organization that provides you with managed IT services in its entirety or portions, depending on the SLA, of your business’ IT processes, that almost always includes round-the-clock monitoring and reporting, and issue resolution, among others.
• Agent
  This refers to the program used by your Managed Service Providers (MSPs) to gather data of your systems and devices. This allows your MSP to monitor their status, update programs, manage your system, and identify issues should there be any.
• Service-level Agreement or SLA
  This is the contract between you and your vendor, that is, your MSP. It sets specifications— itemizing what your MSP will provide you with, the timeframe they can provide it for you, and more importantly, measurable criteria or metrics that allow you to measure success.
• Cloud Computing
  This refers to the delivery of computing services provided on an on-demand basis that covers storage, applications, and processing power, and underpins consumer services as basic as the cloud back up of your photos to more complex hosting services such as music or video streaming services.
• Virtualization
  This refers to the creation of a virtual form of a computing device such as a computer or a server or a software-based resource as in an operating system (OS)—the most common way to do it is by partitioning a hard disk into multiple disks for faster performance and easier storage and retrieval.