IT INFRASTRUCTURE MANAGEMENT
Supporting your IT in-house can be expensive, aggravating, and time-consuming. It’s challenging and costly for small businesses to maintain an IT department and stay current with the latest technology. Companies are seeing IT expenses continually increasing on a month to month basis, and training staff to perform IT tasks takes time away from focusing on work that generates revenue. As a result, growing businesses are beginning to take advantage of outsourcing their IT support to a managed services provider.
Not enough small and medium-sized businesses (SMB’s) understand the benefits of outsourcing. Aside from saving a significant amount of money, outsourcing IT support and managed services can provide a number of long-term benefits towards growth, scalability, and security into the future. We’re going to answer the three most important questions that decision-makers have about outsourcing their IT support through managed services.
There are 3 questions that every business should ask:
Can I Handle My IT Support Issues Myself?
The short answer is yes, but whether or not the effort will be efficient and effective will be determined by factors such the size and scope of your company, expertise of your staff, available budget, time, and willingness to risk encountering unexpected roadblocks that may be difficult for a less experienced team to solve. Your business needs to run as efficiently as possible. Organizations that try to do all IT Services in-house themselves can have much higher research, development, and implementation times – all of which increase costs. Some costs cannot be foreseen, such as lost time attempting to solve issues that occur unexpectedly during the course of a project.
Managed service providers have the capability of offering a much larger array of professional services that may not be available to an in-house IT department.
Without a solid foundation and working knowledge of the most important facets of today’s technology you risk spending costly hours familiarizing yourself with new tools before your business can implement them, and even more time troubleshooting problems and issues that may occur over time (from “why are my files not syncing?” to “how can I get a signature added to my outgoing emails?”) and roadblocks occur everywhere and always at the most inopportune times.
What Are The Advantages of Managed Services?
A qualified systems administrator can easily cost in the neighborhood of £50k per year in salary alone, and it’s important to keep in mind that qualified does not equal experienced. Very few problems are new to a managed services provider maintaining multiple clients with varying needs of support; while an in-house IT staff may lead an isolated existence regardless of how much they train. If your business plans to pursue a strong online marketing and social media presence then it is even more important for the implementing team to be up-to-date on current trends and analytical changes. A proficient managed services provider like us will be able to handle all of these for you.
The benefits of implementing fully outsourced managed services include reduced costs, access to external expertise, intellectual property, and improved operational performance. A holistic outsourced model can also allow organizations to better allocate internal resources on strategic projects and core business operations. Businesses have limited resources, and every manager has limited time and attention. Outsourcing can help your company stay focused on your core business and not get distracted by complex IT decisions.
Most small businesses can not afford to match the in-house support services that larger companies maintain. Outsourcing can help small companies act “big” by giving them access to similar technologies used by larger corporations and the expertise that those companies enjoy. Economy of scale and an independent third party managed cost structure can give your company a competitive advantage.
What Are My Options?
So you’ve decided that managed services is the right next step for your growing company. A very important first step as a business is to familiarize yourself with the right questions to ask a managed services provider. Some questions you should ask include:
- What level of support does each of your managed service plans provide?
- What kind of backups do you have in place in case of equipment or service failure?
- What security measures do you have in place?
- How customisable/adaptable are your managed service plans?
- How do I access my data on your servers?
