When you sign up for a managed IT service, you are committing your cash to a product. For the investment to be worth it, it must deliver a meaningful return. Here’s a look at the various ways a managed IT service provider can be an asset to your small business.
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1. Compete Against Giants
Small businesses do not have anywhere near the technology budget of the giant multinational corporations they must compete against every day. Given how crucial IT has become in giving businesses the edge, small enterprises would appear to face insurmountable odds.
Employing a managed IT service provider helps level the playing field. It leverages economies of scale. This gives small organizations access to the very same sophisticated technology management giant businesses are privy to.
2. Slash Costs of Skilled Employees
IT jobs are in great demand. They are forecast to experience more growth in the coming years when compared to virtually all other occupations. Cybersecurity, for instance, is grappling with a huge number of open positions that far outstrip the available talent. In tandem with this demand, computer and IT positions are well remunerated.
Small businesses simply don’t have the financial wherewithal to draw the best IT talent out there. A managed IT service provider serves multiple clients and can, therefore, afford to attract world-class skills. Your business doesn’t have to pay these high salaries on its own since the cost is split across dozens or hundreds of customers.
3. Focus on Core Tasks
Unless you are running a tech company, IT is not the product at the center of your organization’s existence. Rather, it facilitates business processes. So devoting too much time on getting your tech right would inadvertently be a distraction from your core mandate. Small businesses are especially vulnerable because they are greatly limited in the employees they can assign to different tasks.
A managed IT service provider takes over the headache of ensuring systems are running smoothly. With that, you can concentrate on the business’ primary function and work on the things that will have the greatest impact on your bottom line. In any case, if you don’t enjoy managing and troubleshooting IT systems, leaving it to someone else who does is prudent.
4. Minimal Downtime
Think about how dependent your business is on technology. Now, remember or imagine what happens when you experience a system outage. Each additional minute your business systems are offline is potential revenue lost.
Getting a managed IT service provider to run your systems can greatly reduce the frequency and extent of system outages. The provider has extensive knowledge in implementing robust controls and safeguards. That ensures outages don’t occur and when they do, they are resolved expeditiously. Problems can be tackled before they get out of hand.
5. Versatility
You likely have growth projections for your business. There’s no guarantee that it will follow this trajectory. There may be times when you experience a surge in customer, transaction and website visitor volumes that pushes your existing systems to their limits.
When you are running your IT in house, then the job of making sure the systems scale with this growth will be yours alone. That can be extremely difficult for a small business where the cost and time required to actively monitor volumes are proportionately large.
If you engage a managed IT services provider, the monitoring is more active, detailed and real-time so scaling can be anticipated and executed quickly.
These benefits make a compelling case for moving your systems to a managed IT service provider. Nevertheless, this is contingent on your choosing the right provider since no two are created equal.