But what are “managed services”? Delivering “Managed services” is the practice of outsourcing the responsibility for maintaining, and anticipating need for, a range of IT processes and functions in order to improve operations through improved user-experience, greater efficiency, reduced costs, or enhanced security. Many IT solutions are provided from IT vendors without any support or management – for instance Cloud platforms like Azure or AWS, applications like the Microsoft Office suite, Anti-Virus or Chrome, or hardware devices like wireless access points, switches and firewalls. Organisations often have hundreds or even thousands of different IT assets. Therefore, for those clients without specialist in-house IT skills, additional management expertise and technology is needed to design, build, support, monitor and reliably manage these solutions – these are referred to as “managed” services.