"But I want to run my own IT in-house"
What is more important to you: Focusing on your core business to ensure that it sees the success you’ve been dreaming of or working on fixing the nitty-gritty tech issues happening to your business frequently? Of course, the first one right?
On the other hand, you simply cannot neglect the second part either. Technology is crucial and it can break a business in no time if not managed properly. However, maintaining your own IT infrastructure means a lot of responsibilities, such as strong supervision, hiring skilled talent, keeping yourself up-to-date with new tech, and all these can cost a significant amount of money.
A better solution is outsourcing your IT support to a reliable and competent provider who can maintain your systems better, reduce downtime, and make your business run smoother with innovative technologies.
According to a report by the American Digital Corporation, an enterprise technology solutions provider, 61 per cent of IT leaders plan to invest in outsourced managed services in the coming two years.
Here, we have highlighted 10 reasons, to help you understand why you should consider moving to an outsourced IT support solution. So let’s take a look at them.
1. Cut Costs
According to Prospects, a career advice and job site, a Technical Support Manager can cost you around £40,000 annually and any mid-level IT support officer can come at a cost around £26,000 - £35,000.
However, those figures are just compensation for one employee. There are other employee associated expenses as well, such as Sick Pay, PAYE, National Insurance Contributions, Holiday Pay, recruitment, and training costs.
Also, having a competent in-house IT specialist can be a luxury if you are a small business because you simply can’t afford them. Using outsourced IT support, you can easily reduce your costs as you get a competent team at an affordable, fixed monthly fee. This way, you keep the costs under control while improving your overall ROI.
2. Variations in IT Needs and Workloads
For a small business, IT needs vary throughout the year so you might find it hard to justify keeping an in-house IT specialist on the payroll, but what if something goes wrong and your system suffers a critical failure? Well, it would be very easy to sort out if you’ve outsourced your IT support, as they’d always have a dedicated team on standby. Think about it.
3. No Recruitment Hassles
Recruitment is a daunting and expensive process. Even if you recruit through internal recruiters or a headhunting agency, both will cost you a good amount of time and money and there is no guarantee that you will get the right candidate.
According to a survey conducted by The Tech Partnership, it takes more than a month to fill an average, tech specialist vacancy while hard-to-fill vacancies take over two months. Outsourcing gives you the access to trained and experienced IT resources with just an email or phone call.
4. An Extra Set Of Hands is Needed
You may have a dedicated IT support professional who takes care of all of your needs, but what if he or she gets sick, takes a day off or even goes on vacation? How would your business deal with a system-wide failure or outage?
5. Increase Employee Productivity
Outsourcing your IT support role makes it easier for your employees to stay focused on their primary responsibilities. It does help you cut down on your expenses, but at the same time, frees your employees from any distractions such as dealing with technical issues themselves.
With outsourced IT support, your employees can simply call your provider to fix any problems quickly. This will reduce your downtime, speed up issue resolution, and allow your employees to be more productive.
6. Keep You Apace with Latest Technology
Technology is evolving at a rapid rate. What was unimaginable 10 years ago is a reality today. To stay competitive it is of utmost importance to keep your business up to date.
An IT support provider has a range of accreditations and partnerships with leading technology vendors such as Cisco, Dell, and Microsoft ensuring they stay current with technological advancements.
7. Gives You Access to Additional Services and Solutions
An outsourced IT support provider has experience and knowledge in a wide range of IT specialties. Therefore, if you need an additional service such as business continuity support or crafting an information security policy, they can easily help you.
8. Identify Vulnerabilities Before They Affect Your Business
How quickly issues can be resolved is crucial to your business, but the most important part is how soon you realise the problem. In most cases, figuring out what the problem is, and where it originated from is key to solving them. The longer it takes to find the root cause of the problem, the more your business and employee productivity suffer.
Your outsourced IT provider monitors your systems round-the-clock so they can easily identify and rectify issues before they can even affect your business, eliminating the possibility of any downtime and ensuring your IT services are always available.
9. Keep Your Business Secure
Making your business compliant and secure is important. As technology progresses, so too does the threat of malicious activities such as hacking, data theft, virus and malware attacks. Being proactive in this business environment is key to building a sustainable business model.
Outsourced IT support providers run regular health checks on your IT infrastructure to identify and secure potential vulnerabilities to ensure that your data and systems are always safe.
10. Be Scaleable
Running a business with an out-dated IT infrastructure is one of the worst decisions you could make. Businesses that refuse to keep up with technology can suffer very significant losses.
According to a report by TechWorld, some of the UK’s Metropolitan Police Force waits for up to half an hour each day, to log onto their desktop computers.
The key to success in today’s fast-paced business world is how quickly you can adapt and scale up or down as needed.
Conclusion
By outsourcing your IT support, you get the advantage of more accessible, technical expertise, better network performance, remote monitoring, streamlined PC support, secure infrastructure, and most importantly, easy and instant availability when you need it the most.
Additionally, you can pick up the pace for your business while creating new opportunities to stay ahead of your competition and drive long-term growth.
So when do you plan to outsource your IT support? Do you have any questions? Please feel free to share your opinions in the comments below, and thanks for reading!
