The answer is to outsource the tasks that take you away from your day-to-day business or are not within your skill set. But how do you know when your business is ready for Managed IT Support?
What is Managed IT Support?
Managed IT Support is when all of your IT infrastructure, management and support are outsourced to a third-party supplier like SupportWise. Outsourcing your IT infrastructure can include:
- Hardware and software installation
- Patch management and updates
- Maintenance of IT systems
- Troubleshooting of technical issues within the systems
- Monitoring hardware for issues, faults and vulnerabilities
- Onboarding and off boarding of staff
- Security monitoring
- Data backups
Of course, as a small business you are able to run your IT systems without an in-house support team, by using the break-fix model. Essentially a pay-as-you-go system. This means when there is a problem with your IT systems, you call an IT support engineer, and they will come and solve it.
This ad-hoc system works well, except that often when the problem has started to disrupt the business, it will take longer to troubleshoot than if it had been identified earlier, and ad hoc call outs can be expensive.
The benefits of having Managed IT Support, however, goes beyond it being cost effective for your business.
1. Full IT team – Managed IT Support provides you with 24/7 support across the disciplines within the technology sector with security experts, engineers, software specialists and telecommunications experts. It is not within the budget of many businesses to have such an extensive team available in-house.
2. 24-7 surveillance - Many IT issues can be prevented through monitoring the systems. With Managed IT Support such issues can be addressed before they are even noticed by the users, preventing any downtime.
3. Size isn’t a problem – If you are using ad-hoc IT support, you may decide to save the cost by doing certain tasks yourself, whereas with Managed IT Support the task size is not an issue. The team is available for adding a user to the network, onboarding a new member of staff or having a software or hardware overhaul. Your Managed IT Service is your team to deal with your IT tasks.
4. Your success is our success – With Managed IT Support, if your IT systems seem to be running without a hitch then it means that the team are doing their job properly. With all the work that goes on in the background to keep your business running, the Managed IT Support team endeavour to reduce if not eliminate any business downtime due to IT issues.
So, when do you need Managed IT Support? That is something, you as a business owner will have to judge, but of course, there are some tell-tale signs that doing it in-house is no longer the most efficient path for your business.
- Your business is growing meaning you have more staff to deal with, and therefore more troubleshooting for IT and communications issues.
- You deal with third-party client data and you are worried that a security breach could be detrimental to your business financially and reputationally.
- Your business has already been the victim of a security breach.
- You have no in-house IT staff, and therefore your ad-hoc IT support services are becoming expensive.
- Your business is experiencing more and more downtime due to computer maintenance or issues.
- You want your business to grow but don’t know how to do this and remain compliant.