Appropriate asset allocation is a key consideration for CEOs, who are almost always working from a place of inadequate resources. When you have expensive internal IT staff members completing low-level tasks such as resetting passwords or finding lost files, you’re falling prey to productivity attrition — a near-invisible malady that infests many organizations. Individuals are busy all day long but are challenged to point to specific activities that furthered the organization’s goals and objectives. This causes a ripple effect of frustration as business users clamor to have their projects completed and technology staff members claim to have limited time available for new projects. Fortunately, the solution to this vicious cycle is readily available as IT managed services become more popular with businesses of all sizes.
Why Are IT Managed Services So Popular?
Businesses are always looking for ways to cut costs and grow revenue — two activities that can seem diametrically opposed at times. Reducing the operational load on your business starts with ensuring that you have the right people being as productive as possible in their roles without excess capacity that is not being utilized. Hiring all of the technology specialists that modern businesses need would overburden the business, creating an unsustainable situation. With IT managed services, you’re gaining access to a stable to highly-trained, motivated and talented individuals who are specialists in their unique fields: cybersecurity, network engineering, mobile device management, proactive web and email protection and more.
Benefits of IT Managed Services for Your Business
Are your business users complaining about the time required for the completion of basic activities such as password resets, software licensing issues and hardware challenges? From reducing the load on your budget to enhancing the internal user experience, there are many benefits of IT managed services for your business.
Boosting Staff Productivity
With IT managed services, leaders find that there are pockets of productivity that can be gained throughout the business by simply speeding the time required to respond to internal user requests. Instead of waiting for several hours for an internal help desk representative to find time to respond to their query while business users are not productive in their tasks, concerns can be answered quickly by an offsite IT managed services help desk professional. Plus, IT support providers often add value to the overall process by offering access to advanced help desk tools that track requests, provide reports on system availability and more.
Enhanced Cybersecurity Protection
Cybersecurity is a major concern for business leaders and one of the easiest ways to create a more secure environment for customers and users is to proactively apply security patches to software. Regular hardware upgrades can also tighten up any security concerns. When you work with an IT managed services provider, you can set required service levels so you can rest assured that the work is being completed on schedule. Having access to cybersecurity professionals has an added value, as these specialists are constantly listening for new threats and learning how to identify and combat those threats. They leverage this knowledge to help support your business in a way that it would be difficult for a fractional internal team member to do.
More Consistent Budgeting
While reducing full-time staffing requirements for support is a powerful reason to move to a managed services model, there is another appealing aspect from a budgeting perspective. It’s not unusual for technology costs to balloon over time, as it can be difficult to adequately predict the costs of outages or potential losses. When you are utilizing external IT managed services resources, you are organically gaining a continuity model for your business. Depending on the terms of your contract, your hardware and telephony may be covered — effectively reducing the risk of unexpected technology costs that could cause your leadership team to scramble to find funding or put off important purchases that support business growth. IT managed services are billed on a monthly, quarterly or annual basis and allow you to accurately predict your technology spend over time.
High-Level Technical Expertise
It’s an unfortunate reality, but a CIO simply may not be an option for many businesses. This visionary technology leader does everything from roadmapping upgrades to pushing forward important technology projects — but it is an expensive position to staff and maintain due to the level of required experience and knowledge that you need. Many IT managed services partners can help step into this skills gap by acting as project managers for major projects, offering quarterly meetings to review IT and business strategy and looking for process improvements throughout the organization. This is a hidden value that may not be considered when looking for a technology partner, but it’s an important one.
Backup and Disaster Recovery Planning
Your business continuity is an important part of operational readiness, but one that can be difficult to budget time for in many businesses. Keeping your business online may start with a comprehensive cloud-based backup strategy, but that is only the beginning of true IT resilience. Without a technology partner that is able to leverage their best practices from across multiple verticals, you may find that internal IT leaders are spending significant amounts of time on activities that may not contribute to a cohesive plan to support your business in the event of a disaster.
From reducing the ongoing cost of your technology support to proactively defining ways to keep your business online, CEOs are increasingly looking to IT managed services providers to offer solutions to complex business challenges. This knowledgeable partner supplies a layer of standards and best practices that can help strengthen your overall operations and reduce risk.
