Every day, business technology grows in complexity. There are constant changes surrounding IT infrastructure, security, and beyond. How can small-to-medium sized businesses keep up? Internal IT departments are bogged down with day-to-day tasks, preventing strategic proactive planning. Plus, resource limitations also mean limited expertise across the technology spectrum. Managing IT can be burdensome and C-suites spend large amounts of time focusing on their technology, rather than core business. For example, at a NetGain event last week, a CEO of a community bank said he spends 20% of his overall time on technology and acknowledged his limited knowledge on the subject. Technology dependency to successfully run a business is not going away anytime soon therefore, most businesses are utilizing the benefits of managed IT services in some form or fashion to help.
Top three Benefits of a Managed IT Services Provider Partnership
Control IT Costs
More Bang for Your Buck
We hear it often. Business leaders feel like IT is a black hole of escalating, uncontrollable expenses.
Hiring, paying, and maintaining a highly qualified IT staff is beyond the budget and bandwidth of most small and medium businesses (SMBs). The median tenure of an IT professional can be as little as one year. IT jobs are in high demand. Supply is down, demand is up, so salaries are up. Finding, training, and retaining qualified candidates for your technology team is a burden managed services providers (MSPs) can lift off your shoulders.
Executives also report the threat of cyber-attack is something that keeps many business leaders up at night. You can’t read the news without seeing a mention of the latest security breach. And as the challenges and complexities of managing technology grow year over year, an over-worked in-house IT staff tends to lose focus on the preparation and defenses that needed in order to thwart or recover from such an attack. It is truly a downward spiral that many businesses don’t become aware of until it is too late.
At the end of the day, many businesses find themselves in a reactive, unpredictable, and very expensive posture when it comes to managing their technology. Partnering with an MSP maximizes your IT budget by maintaining a large team with certifications across a variety of technology fields for a single monthly fee. This gives you the ability to allocate resources on an as-needed basis, and allows your IT budget to become much more predictable.
Improve Efficiency
Decreased Downtime
Downtime is frustrating, as it is costly (downtime price tags can be up to $427 per minute and prevents you from being productive. With a larger bandwidth of IT employees available to help when issues arise, downtime is shorter, and problems are resolved faster. Additionally, you have a dedicated team whose sole focus is continually solving problems on the back end by your MSP, which means fewer errors and decreased downtime overall.
Keep Your Employees Working
Professionals spend an average of 22 minutes per day dealing with IT related issues, which adds up to more than 91 hours of lost time per year. When using an MSP, end user issues are resolved in an agreed upon timeframe (established in your service agreement), allowing employees to keep working with fewer interruptions, and much less lost time.
Project Completion
Project turnaround time is faster as you have multiple individuals who are dedicated to finishing projects in an effective and efficient manner. Gone are the days of your internal staff trying to juggle hundreds of tasks every day just to stay afloat, while continually putting off necessary but time-consuming larger projects.
Help Your Internal IT Staff
By alleviating your internal IT staff from the day-to-day “fires” and repetitive proactive duties, that are usually pushed to the bottom of the priority list, your team can focus on how technology is supporting your core business objectives.
Less downtime, fewer end user interruptions, and faster project completion means more time to focus on what you want to be doing - running and growing your business.
Technology Strategy that Moves You Forward
An Expert Team Behind You
Today’s technology landscape is hard to navigate, especially if you want to be proactive, not reactive. Expert personnel within your managed services provider are dedicated to helping you implement and use technology to support and mature your business.
Individuals like Virtual Chief Information Officers (vCIOs) are informed on the latest aspects of the technology landscape and provide consultations on how IT can be leveraged to execute your business strategy and vision. As new technology emerges, such as the cloud services or Internet of Things (IoT), you have someone in your corner that understands how it affects your organization and how it can be used as a competitive advantage for your business.
Your vCIO and IT strategy team will partner with you to understand your business’ objectives, technical environment, strategic plans, and budget, ensuring you have a comprehensive plan that benefits your business.
The plan your vCIO creates with you will have benchmarks year over year to track technical competency, ensuring you are progressing in the right manner to achieve your goals. Working with a managed IT services provider is truly a partnership and allows you to focus on the strategic growth of your business.
Managed IT services providers alleviate the burden of managing your own technology, offering access to a wide variety of experts, while improving efficiency and collaborating with you to progress business objectives. Take advantages of the benefits of managed IT services – let the professionals take care of your technology, so you can get back to growing your core business.
Interested in taking advantage of the cost-effective, growth-promoting benefits of managed IT services? Contact Us Today !
