5 Ways to Embrace Managed IT Services

When you run your own business, you have to wear many hats: accountancy, bookkeeping, credit control, marketing, PR, sales, and IT support. And that is on top of the actual skills you have to run your particular business. 

The problem with wearing so many hats is that some simply won’t fit – and that is where outsourcing can be the answer. By outsourcing your IT services, you can ensure that your IT systems are secure, set up correctly, kept updated and monitored 24/7 so issues are solved before they manifest themselves and cause problems to your business. 

So, how do you embrace Managed IT Services? 

1.  Inventory - Identify all the IT tasks that are required within your business – from onboarding and offboarding, to troubleshooting, updates, and procurement. Who carries out these tasks? Are they qualified? Are they in addition to their ‘day job’? If so, how much of a priority is IT? 

2.  Costing – Once you have identified what tasks need doing and who does them, record how much time is taken up with IT, and cost against the staff hourly rate. If you have had downtime, how much did this cost the business? If there have been security issues how much did it cost to fix and to recover any lost data? Knowing your figures can help put it all into perspective. 

3. Risk Assessment – What does your business have to lose if there is a security breach? How sensitive is the data you hold on staff, clients, and contractors? Would you want this data in the public domain? How safe are your IT systems? How up to date are all your applications and software? 

4.  Growth – Most businesses want to grow and have business goals which reflect this. But could your current IT systems cope with more staff, more clients, more traffic? How would you know when your systems are at breaking point? Leave it until they start running a bit slow? 

5.  Productivity – Do you know how much time is wasted by staff dealing with slow, ailing hardware or software? Have you had new starters twiddling their thumbs as they haven’t been set up on the systems before they arrive? When a PC fails (or even the entire network) how long have staff had to wait before they can get back to work? How much does all this lack of productivity cost the business in lost hours? (See point 2 above) 

Unless you have a dedicated IT team, all of these considerations can prove to be expensive, unreliable and difficult to manage.

When you engage with Managed IT Support all of these concerns are covered. You get a skilled IT team available at your fingertips ensuring:

• All your software, hardware and security systems are installed and regularly updated.
• Your systems are monitored 24/7 meaning many potential issues or security breaches are identified before they happen reducing or even eliminating downtime to your business.
• You will be alerted when your hardware is reaching end of life or function capacity as well as help procuring hardware at the most cost-effective price.
• All your staff are onboarded in time for their start date, as well as removed from the systems when they stop working with your organisation.
• Any issues are dealt with quickly and efficiently reducing the disruption caused to your business.
• All your systems and data are backed up securely.
• Should the worst happen and there is a security breach, then the recovery and troubleshooting will be quick with minimum disruption to your business, due to having a robust data recovery process in place.

You are likely to find that using Managed IT Services will work out cheaper in real terms than attempting to do it in-house, with a fixed monthly fee which can expand with your business meaning you only ever pay for what you need when you need it. ‍ 

To find out how SupportWise can help with your IT services contact the team today.