Many partnerships have developed between turnkey MSPs and other service providers, mainly ASPs and hosting contractors. MSPs are filling the gaps in management for these vendors, letting them offer more complete packages. Besides e-business applications and externally hosted systems, some MSPs are targeting their services at enterprises' internal infrastructure and application management needs, for example, monitoring the corporate data center, where resources are often scarce and time is better spent on other tasks. In the past, integrators implemented these management solutions but did not generally operate them on an ongoing basis. This is changing, but slowly.
Enterprises often have the tools, along with a culture of implementing management in-house.
Targeted MSP services are similar to turnkey offerings but with a much tighter focus. It's within this category that we find the SSP twins, offering security and storage. VPN capabilities delivered to an organization without the need to deploy, manage or maintain the VPN internally. Telenisus Corp. Managed firewall services also take deployment and maintenance tasks out of the IT group's hands, but what is especially attractive is that the firewall provider also maintains user access rights, which is the biggest burden. The customer requests changes, and the vendor validates that the requests meet security policy then implements changes.