Is outsourcing IT help right for you?
Many times, small businesses cringe at the concept of outsourcing. Those who start their own companies like the control and autonomy it provides them. Unfortunately, that preference for control and autonomy may have some bad side effects when it comes to IT – like overworking IT staff, wasting time and money.
IT staff in many small business don’t have the resources to fully support all of their IT infrastructure needs. The present in-house staff is most likely very busy putting out day-to-day fires. One statistic suggests 65% of IT budgets go to nothing more than keeping the lights on. In short, staff is busy making sure the printer work or reloading a PC infected by a virus after an employee fell for a phishing email. This means that instead of an IT manager proving their worth to a business by improving operational, efficiency, or enhancing productivity or competitiveness, they are treading water waiting for another problem to pop up.
There is an alternative to going it alone
Managed Service Providers are outside consultants you can bring in to handle the day-to-day tasks, so you can be more productive and shine in front of your boss.
How might an MSP supplement your IT efforts?
- 24/7 operations center – Small businesses can benefit from, but simply cannot afford 24/7 internal monitoring of their IT infrastructure. Many of the issues that become costly business disruptions, such as hardware, software, and applications failures are completely preventable if they’re detected and addressed early enough. It is a reality that your systems run 24/7, but you can’t support a 24/7 IT staff. A MSP, however, can use economies of scale to provide around the clock monitoring of your IT operations.
- Disaster recovery and business continuity plans – Small businesses have limited resources, so if there were to be a serious business interruption or data loss, they could be completely out of luck. A MSP can be brought in to design a complete solution.
In Summary
These are just 2 ways that a small business can save time and money from passing along daily IT support to an outside source. In both cases, you don’t lose any control of the key parts of the business operation. Instead, the distractions of IT support are moved along to an expert, while the IT Manager focuses on what they do best: plan and implement longer term goals. We’ll talk in another blog about other benefits of outsourcing IT, but in the meantime, see our e-guide “Outsourcing Isn’t a Dirty Word: Meet Managed Services, Your IT Team’s New Best Friend – Managed Services”.
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