The Importance of an Ed-MSP for Your school’s IT and Security Needs.
How Orange Crew Can Help Your School
Orange Crew is investing in the infrastructure and education to become the first IT Company operating the MSP model of service to focus on supporting schools in Southern California. Orange Crew is in a very good position to take the lead because of its experience with the schools it currently supports. Contact Orange Crew today to see how we can help!
The toughest challenges faced by charter schools can be solved with a managed service provider. An MSP can provide schools that lack an IT department with a full-service team of professionals, without the expense of training its own staff and management. An increasing number of colleges and universities are taking advantage of managed IT services to augment their IT staff and cost-effectively fill holes in their organizations. Services include help desks, application and network support, IT security, and cloud-based data backup and recovery.
Managed service providers (MSPs) have become an attractive option for educational institutions as they face budget shortfalls and reduced IT budget. This is especially true during the COVID-19 pandemic, when they are relying more on technology for online instruction and remote work. Indeed, a recent EDUCAUSE survey found that 63 percent of colleges had slashed their IT budgets for the 2020-2021 academic year. “Managed services of all types help with organizations’ staffing limitations. They eliminate the need for an upfront capital investment in equipment,” says Amy Larsen DeCarlo, a principal analyst with GlobalData. “The subscription-based model is more predictive. You can budget more accurately, and in areas where organizations have little expertise, such as security, managed IT services can be helpful.” “The adoption of managed services paid dividends last spring when the pandemic forced classes to go virtual. The college was prepared to handle a flood of troubleshooting calls as employees worked remotely and as many faculty and students taught and learned online for the first time. Help desk calls increased 20 to 30 percent during the early days of the pandemic.”
What is the difference between an MSP and an ed-MSP?
Managed services providers are becoming the norm when supporting small businesses such as schools. We have moved away from the one-size-fits-all model of MSPs to a point where we can create a new type of MSP that is mainly focused on education. To show the contrast of what the difference is from traditional MSP to an ed-MSP we start by clarifying that an ed-MSP is and MSP with the additional services that can help school provide its services more efficiently and get the most out of programs.
A traditional MSP should provide the following services:
Provide a reliable, secure, diverse and modern IT infrastructure to allow easy access to educational tools on any platform.
School leaders can stop spending their time troubleshooting students’ device issues and take the time to, instead, for example, think through whether the school’s Chromebook model meets its unique instructional needs. With an IT managed service provider, an assistant principal can spend extra time in classrooms, directly observing, teaching, and learning, and less time, for instance, on the phone with a parent struggling to understand the school’s parent portal and why his username and password combination isn’t working. An ed-MSP will offer all the services a regular MSP offers plus:
