If you’re a business owner looking to scale in any way, one of the first things you need to know is how your IT operations are going to grow with the rest of your business.
Gone are the days when IT is a minimal part of your budget, and therefore, your business, no matter what industry you’re in. Whether you’re a funeral home director or a theoretical physicist, computers – in other words, information technology – have become so intertwined with every aspect of business that it has become the spine of every company’s operations.
The most difficult part is that as technology becomes more important to keeping businesses operating, it also becomes more complex, more expansive, and more confusing to anyone who isn’t an expert in the field.
With that in mind, one thing that any business owner has to ask themselves as they grow their business, and therefore, grow their IT operations: should I hire an internal team? Or should I outsource my IT operations?
But what are the benefits of outsourcing your IT? As a business owner, it may feel natural to want to keep things in-house and hire employees – but that might not be necessary or even make sense for your business.
In this article, we’ll help you understand why people would want a Managed IT service provider to take care of their business’ IT.
The Bottom Line: Increasing Your Bottom Line
The most obvious and direct benefit of hiring out your managed IT team is the cost savings they offer.
Managed IT providers realize that they offer unique cost savings that cannot be matched by internal hiring. With the cost of employing IT managers reaching nearly $100,000 per year, not including insurance, benefits, taxes, and so on, you can see why managed IT services are in demand these days.
Managed IT services offer solutions that cater to your business needs but without the incredible expenditure of a full-time, salaried professional. Since you can cater your services, they can meet your specific needs, which allows them to offer a lower price than internal hires.
In addition, managed IT providers are constantly updating their prices. They maintain systems on an ongoing basis and forecast future IT expenditures, adapting their plans constantly based on the current situation and future growth plans.
This proactive approach keeps IT infrastructure ticking like a well-oiled machine for longer, staving off sudden IT costs that could otherwise cause financial distress.
A Crack Team of IT Specialists
Another massive benefit of managed IT services is that you gain the expertise of an entire dedicated IT organization when you sign on with them. Unlike hiring an IT manager, who then has to spend your time and money finding a team of IT professionals who fit your company’s needs and niche, a managed IT provider will have a whole team of seasoned veterans ready for your challenges.
It’s basically personal, on-tap expertise. When you call your managed IT partner with a problem, you can expect a team ready to troubleshoot and improve your systems. This also ties into keeping costs down. With a team of experts, they don’t necessarily need one specific person on your account, they keep their costs – and your prices down.
A Bodyguard – But For Your Data
Another massive boon of hiring a managed IT team is expert cybersecurity. Even if you hired someone internally, cybersecurity and data protection tend to be specialist fields. As we outlined in the last section, outsourced IT service providers can call upon a team of experts – especially in cybersecurity – to protect your sensitive stuff.
Data protection is more crucial than ever in our world. In addition to offering data protection like 24/7 monitoring, your IT partners can also help you strategically invest in technologies like software and hardware that can improve your company’s security.
Experts On Demand
Hiring a 24/7 team in-house is a want that few companies have the resources to fulfill. One of the big benefits of outsourced IT is their quick response time. Again, we’re going to refer to the fact that they’ve always got a team on standby – so response times will be much lower than your 1-man IT operation where he’s got to drive 2 hours to the server room.
Managed service providers are actually beholden to their service-level agreements (SLAs) and service-level objectives (SLOs) that dictate the response time to IT events – so you can actually know, objectively, how long you may experience any downtime. For some companies, that is invaluable for resource planning.
Minimize Network Downtime (And Save $5,600 Per Minute!)
A big concern for any business owner is any potential network downtime. IT thought leaders Gartner found that IT outages cost companies $5,600 PER MINUTE – and that study by Gartner came out almost TEN YEARS AGO. Imagine how expensive it must be now, with the stratospheric cost of basic necessities in 2023!
A managed IT partner serves as your company’s personal safety net. Anytime you experience an outage – or if your 24/7 provider even sniffs the possibility of downtime – managed IT providers will step in as soon as possible to keep your company running.
Your Personal Cloud Expert
Everyone knows how important “the cloud” is for successful businesses nowadays – 94% of companies rely on some form of cloud computing for their day-to-day operations.
With that in mind, it can be extremely useful to companies of all shapes and sizes to get an expert’s help with navigating the complex web of systems, providers, and service plans when it comes to the cloud.
Managed IT services provide the advantage of lowering security risks through cloud data backups, simplifying the complexity of cloud computing, optimizing infrastructure costs, improving process scalability, and streamlining migrations with proven cloud migration strategies.
Scale – Without Spending Too Much
If you’re a growing business or a business that has its sights set on growing in the near future, hiring an IT provider to help your IT services grow with you can be invaluable to your business.
Managed IT services offer greater scalability than in-house teams – as they can provide a variable range of support to meet evolving needs without the heavy costs of full-time employees. This allows businesses to navigate growth phases smoothly and scale up their operations at a pace that allows them to grow naturally and securely.
Taking the Headache Out of IT Vendor Management
Ever been on the phone with Comcast customer service?
Sorry to bring up that painful memory, but we wanted to give you an idea of what it’s like to handle all the various odds and ends of an effective IT system.
One of the most underrated benefits of a managed IT team is they can handle all the annoying parts of IT: the calling, the pricing, the comparing, the arguing, the waiting on the phone for hours, and so on.
And you even can gain a competitive advantage on pricing, get favorable terms for services and hardware, and ensure you’re not being overcharged. Your managed IT provider basically becomes an in-house IT salesperson or negotiator, advocating for your business with vendors and providers – an underrated benefit of managed IT services!
Set It And Forget It IT Management
Another massive benefit of managed IT – and one that is rarely talked about – is all the time and energy savings you get from never having to worry about your IT.
You’re not in the IT business, so why would you want to take your time and focus away from your core business? No matter what your actual business is, without a managed IT provider, you’d find yourself doing a lot of IT work.
With a managed IT service, you literally only have to engage with your IT as much as you’d like. After all, your IT is in expert hands.
Managed IT Services: A Necessity In The Future?
Outsourcing your IT is not only a smart move – it’s increasingly becoming a necessity to survive in the brutal world of 2023 business.
Outsourced IT accounts for 77% of the total IT market – a number that’s growing at 7% a year – so it seems businesses the world over are looking to free themselves from the yoke of internal business IT.
There’s a billion and one reasons to hire someone to handle the increasingly complex series of systems, protocols, hardware, and software that comprises even the smallest business’ IT infrastructure.
Contact us today and get a fearless expert to come in and fix up your IT operations – and free up time and space for the more important parts of your business!