Very few companies can operate today without some form of IT infrastructure in place for their business. Even the most technologically resistant companies will still likely have to employ IT services for communication or data storage. Maintaining the IT infrastructure your company relies on is a complex and expensive task, requiring specialist and dedicated employees.
Managed IT services is a growing industry of over US$200 billion and is expected to grow by another 50% in the next few years. Managed services allow your company to benefit from dedicated and specialist IT support without having to worry about the downsides of maintaining an in-house team. So, what are some of the benefits?
Controlling IT costs
IT service costs can get out of hand quickly. An in-house team of IT experts to manage your services can easily cost tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars depending on your requirements for staffing alone, with licensing, training, and emergency costs on-top.
Outsourcing your service management to a managed service provider gives you all the benefits of specialist knowledge and fast 24/7 response time, but at a much lower fixed monthly cost. This makes it much easier to plan your IT budget for the year ahead while still being about to trust your system is well-maintained.
Read Benefits of Upgrading Your Company’s Technology
Reducing downtime
Keeping downtime to a minimum is essential for any business. Downtime can have significant adverse effects on your business, profits, and reputation. But ensuring your systems stay online 24/7 is a complex task best suited to specialists.
Few companies can afford the financial and operational burden of in-house teams that can pro-actively monitor your systems for issues before they take everything offline. Managed IT service providers, however, can do exactly that. Their IT professionals are paid to monitor your systems for developing issues, fixing them before they become critical, keeping your systems online expect in the most severe circumstances.
Freeing up IT staff
IT departments are often stretched thin dealing with the various everyday issues that occur in your business. Helping users with questions and issues, changing hardware such as broken keyboards or monitors, and checking budgets and equipment purchases.
If IT staff also have to manage the entire infrastructure and monitor for issues or downtime, you’ll be faced with either compromising on the work or hiring more expensive staff. Outsourcing the time-costly job of managing your infrastructure to a managed service provider frees up your in-house IT staff for other IT work within your company.
Reducing infrastructure expenses
IT infrastructure is a costly business. Hardware is expensive to buy, operate, and insure; staff training is an ongoing battle and expense in an ever-changing IT landscape, and licensing costs can quickly spiral.
Utilizing a managed IT service provider can help you to reduce all these costs. Managed service providers can offer large discounts compared to self-operated infrastructure due to the economies of scale they benefit from when managing infrastructure for hundreds of companies.
Final thoughts
As you can see outsourcing your IT infrastructure services and needs to a managed provider comes with a great many benefits. Financial savings alone can be as high as $1,469 per user annually when using a managed IT service compared to host things in-house through reduced licensing, training, and maintenance costs.
The additional benefits of a more streamlined infrastructure (making staffs lives easier), reducing downtime, and greater IT staff availability for day-to-day work makes the decision to implement managed IT services one of the best you can make for your business.
