Did you know that over 50% of all companies find investing in third-party support teams critical? Information technology (IT) is the latest competitive ground, and your competitors aren’t taking chances.
Due to this, many firms now consider managed service providers (MSPs) crucial for their success. If you’re looking to tap into higher-level IT expertise and infrastructure, keep reading to uncover the benefits of managed IT services for your firm.
They include:
Focus on Your Core Business
If you are considering outsourcing IT, the odds are high that your core competencies lie in other areas. In such scenarios, partnering with a support firm can help you reap more productivity dividends.
Firms that decide to take on their IT burden often tend to get bogged down in the weeds. For example, your team will spend hours troubleshooting system issues. While that saves you some money, it costs you more.
These same team members could be putting that time into mission-critical work that moves the needle for your business. Instead, they devote precious hours to non-critical support work.
Add such instances up, and you can see the hit to your productivity at the end of the year. Partner with an IT support services firm for better business-oriented outcomes for your team through a dedicated focus on your core operations.
Better Cost Management
While IT is crucial to your business, it’s also true that it can cost you a pretty penny. Recruiting a team and training them to run the infrastructure alone is a significant investment.
Furthermore, if your business calls for more resources, you need to come up with the funding for it regardless of the economic cycle you may be in. Such unexpected service costs can make a significant dent in your reserves.
When you bring an IT outsourcing firm onboard, your costs come down. For starters, many providers have an offshore and onshore service model. That helps you tap into the most optimal combination of resources to bring down costs.
In terms of unexpected service costs, the MSP you work with likely offers a tailor-made service-level agreement (SLA) for your firm. As a result, you don’t have to incur any extra and unexpected capital expenses to sustain your infrastructure.
If you find an MSP with a strategic partnership with another vendor you use, like your cloud provider, they can escalate support issues for you. You’ll save both time and money by letting the provider follow up on IT matters for you.
Operational Flexibility
Regardless of where your firm is IT-wise, your needs will evolve as your business changes. Since IT is a core part of your operations, you can’t but scale it up or down in direct response to your business needs.
As such, working with an MSP becomes more advantageous as you get optimal flexibility in scalability.
If you experience an unexpected uptick, your MSP can allocate more resources to your firm in real-time. That is faster than how most businesses can respond, given the cost implications.
When assessing potential vendors, ensure you look for a provider offering advanced services like proactive monitoring and reporting. Hiring an MSP offering upgraded service release management is also a plus for scalability.
Tap into World-Class Expertise and Experience
For any MSP, IT is their full-time focus. Unlike the firms they service, the providers wake up every day to uncover new skills and train their workers on them.
When you decide to take IT in-house, you commit to this same level of training and expertise. Unsurprisingly, many firms soon fall behind as they have a host of other pressing matters to attend to.
What does that lead to?
It leads to an IT team that isn’t as highly trained. Furthermore, because it’s an in-house IT team, there is no exposure to what other industries are doing with IT to help brainstorm and inspire valuable innovation.
Hiring an MSP guarantees you the latest expertise as the provider’s team is continuously trained on the latest technological skills. You, therefore, receive bleeding-edge experience at a fraction of the cost you would have paid for it.
Another crucial advantage an MSP provides is workers with rich experience in varied fields. These workers will deliver lessons and tips gained from adjacent areas to help firm up your operations in ways you’d never have conceived of.
A Reliable Contact Point
Working with a dedicated MSP also helps you develop a consistent relationship, which bodes well for your business. Since it’s one provider interfacing with your firm and not a cast of several vendors, they get to learn your firm’s needs better.
Over time, not only will the MSP know what you need, but they will better anticipate your future needs, making your operations more efficient.
Security and Compliance
According to Pics ITech, around 60% of security attacks could be prevented by basic security measures. Working with an MSP is critical in helping you secure your IT infrastructure as they adopt bleeding-edge protocols for their clients.
Additionally, an MSP also helps you secure your IT in compliance with industry rules and regulations.
For example, if you’re a small business handling customer data, an MSP can help you best comply with General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) principles.
Quality Support
If IT is mission-critical to your operations, you lose money whenever the function is down. Gartner’s research shows that network downtime erodes businesses’ value to the tune of $5,600 per minute.
Unless your firm has that kind of money to toss around, you need to hire an MSP who can help develop contingency measures for infrastructure breakdown.
On top of that, experienced IT service providers can help you develop a business continuity plan should anything happen to your small business IT infrastructure. If the unexpected does occur, your investment in IT support services will have more than paid for itself.
Reap the Benefits of Managed IT Services
Every business now finds technology as a key driver of its competitiveness. For most firms, that means investing in hiring MSPs who can offer higher scale IT than they can invest on their own.
Tap into the benefits of managed IT services to ensure your firm maximizes its productivity to stay ahead of the pack.
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