Managed network services are the communications and networking services that an organization chooses to outsource in order to hold down both its IT-related overhead in general and its IT personnel costs in particular. Among other things, it resolves the expensive HR processes of recruiting, hiring, relocating, training, and retaining high-quality IT personnel by moving those processes to a partner that has extensive experience in these processes, while taking advantage of the managing partner's having a local presence enabling it to effectively utilize the vast international workforce of trained, certified IT professionals, who are often better prepared to function in an international marketplace of diverse populations. Further, it allows those costs to be portioned out over time, at set amounts, rather than forcing an organization to make large upfront expenditures to develop and manage its data and networking services. It also takes into account an organization's increasing need, due to a fat-paced global economy, to access its data, data management, and networking services around the clock. As with many control tools and factors, the key here is reducing the impact on an organization's bottom line, and increasing the return on its investment of IT dollars.

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Sharepoint services are one of the most important parts of managed network services because they allow collaboration by various users, from both local and remote sites, while preserving multiple versions of documents so that changes and updates can be tracked and shared. The use of sharepoint services allows organizations great flexibility in terms of managing users as well as of documents. It works like a library, allowing the various collaborative parties to check a document in and out of the data library so that only one party is updating the document at a time. It also maintains the permissions that allow various levels of access documents, such as the ability to only read the document, or modify it, or create new documents. It also stores all prior versions of a document, in case there is a need to return to an earlier version due to, for example, a change in the assumptions used to create the document. This streamlining of the collaboration process greatly reduces the need for business travel, which further reduces the impact on an organization's bottom line.

Given the exorbitant costs of doing business in today's marketplaces (whether local or global), the need for the acquisition of time-sensitive data, and the necessity of an organization's having the flexibility to respond quickly and confidently to shifts in any number of markets to meet the needs of its clients and customers, it is clear that managed network services are a critical element of an organization's ability to function in a timely manner and hold down costs to reduce IT and HR impacts on its bottom line, thereby maximizing returns to shareholders and to the organization in general, even as it dramatically increases its ability to function in real-time in a marketplace that now runs 24 hours/7 days a week.