It doesn’t matter whether you’re a small business with less than 5 employees or a large enterprise with 1000s of staff, how quickly you respond to queries and resolve problems is critical to your success.
Customer expectations are now so high that any downtime or delay has real consequences on your ability to retain and win customers.
Perhaps more importantly, delays and downtime frustrate your own staff internally and cost you money. In today’s interconnected workplace, the most common cause of downtime is a failure in one or more of your IT systems and a lack of available resource and knowledge to resolve problems quickly.
Staying up to date with the latest essential upgrades from Microsoft and others whilst getting lost in the process of updating computers is not what you set out in business to do. Even worse, how can you protect your network from ransomware and stop hackers getting at your data whilst also helping the sales team resolve an email problem?
You know that getting caught up in all of these problems is not the best use of your time. You should be out there winning business and helping the company grow. But what other options do you have?
Well, one option is to hire a dedicated IT technician. The biggest barrier with this is that hiring good staff takes time. It’s also very expensive. As a small business, resources are tight enough as it is. Allocating what little you have spare to an in-house IT Support team can affect your short-term growth potential. As a larger organisation, investing in a dedicated in-house IT Support department is a significant investment that takes time to realise fully.
Then there’s Managed IT Support. Managed IT Support gives you all the advantages of having an in-house IT Support department at a fraction of the cost without any of the hiring delays. A Managed IT Support Provider will be fully up-to-date with the latest developments, fully certified to resolve problems and be able to proactively monitor your systems, letting you know there’s a problem before you know it yourself. All for a fixed monthly fee.
Not everyone will be ready for a Managed IT Support contract, and a lot depends on your size and growth plans for the future.
To help you make the best decision for your company, we’ve put together this list of 10 Unmistakable Signs that Your Business is Ready for Managed IT Support. It will help you identify the IT bottlenecks within your business that are preventing your growth and help you decide if Managed IT Support can help you unblock them.
1. Your IT infrastructure is out of date
Technology is moving at such pace that both small and large businesses are increasingly finding out that their technology infrastructure is not up to date. Nothing reminds you more of this than when a pre-planned video conference call experiences lag and delay and sound skips out every now and then.
Or when a client sends you a file and you can’t open it, or electronically sign it, or when your sales team tell you they can’t do their jobs because the latest business development software is not available.
A Managed IT Support Provider can identify these issues before they become a problem and give you the knowledge to resolve them before they start to affect your reputation.
2. Your IT infrastructure is not growing well with your business
You want to keep your technology up to date but every time you recruit, a new member of staff the process of equipping them with phones, mobiles, tablets, pcs and software is cumbersome and often results in more problems arising than expected.
You don’t have the skills in house to make sure the new technology gets installed quickly without problems and the cost in downtime to the business is more than it needs to be.
A Managed IT Support Provider can make this process happen smoothly and quickly, and make it painless for you to recruit new staff and expand your IT provision.
3. You struggle to keep up to date with new technologies and fail to regularly implement those that can improve your business
With so many software programs used every day in the modern workplace, the amount of updates that need to be implemented is seemingly endless. How do you make sure that every single member of your team updates their software as soon as an update is available? Do you have a policy that automatically updates for all users?
A Managed IT Support Provider’s entire service provision rests on their ability to keep you up to date on every front; from software updates that improve productivity to security updates that keep you safe from the latest ransomware attacks.
With a Managed IT Support Provider, you can focus on what you do best whilst your Managed IT Support Provider deals with keeping your systems up to date.
4. You would benefit from more in-house IT expertise
There’s a noticeable lack of IT expertise within your company. One of the biggest benefits of working with a Managed IT Support Provider is you get access to a wealth of IT expertise and knowledge that you would otherwise have to pay a premium for if you were to bring it directly into your workforce.
IT should not be left to the member of staff with the most expertise in IT issues because if that role is not their full time job then the inevitable consequence will be that something, somewhere will be forgotten or go unnoticed that will have an impact on business performance.
Can you afford for this kind of innocent mistake?
5. You experience a lot of downtime
Downtime is the bane of all companies in the modern workforce. With everything being so connected and the majority of your work relying so heavily on your network reliability; from emails to conferences to telephone systems, any downtime in this element has real and potentially lasting consequences to your business and reputation.
Do you have the expertise to understand network downtime and get things back up and running quickly? Can you ensure that no data is lost? Do you have any idea how much data will be lost in the event of a system failure?
A Managed IT Support Provider will proactively monitor your network so that downtime is kept to a minimum, making you aware of potential bottlenecks or points of failure before they cause problems for your business.
6. You don’t have the knowledge to handle a critical system failure or implement a disaster recovery plan
If your IT systems failed, would you know how to bring everything back online? Could you do it quickly, without disruption to your business? System failures can be caused by all kinds of events, some of them can be identified early and others, like power cuts for instance, happen unexpectedly.
In each case, could you bring your network back up? How much data would be lost? Would you have a plan to recover data in the event a hard drive or server was permanently damaged?
A Managed IT Support Provider will have all the provisions in place to handle this kind of critical failure and all the resources you need to bring things back online quickly, with minimal disruption to your business.
7. You don’t have access to statistics that show you exactly how much time IT support has cost (or saved) your business
You don’t know how much IT problems are costing your business. As a small or large business handling most of your IT in-house, unless you have created a dedicated support logging system, you won’t know how much time and money IT support has cost your business.
IT support can be both a cost and a saving but if you have no measurement procedures in place, how do you know?
A Managed IT Support Provider will come with a comprehensive system for tracking and measuring support time and costs and will give you a visual representation of just how much IT support costs your business.
8. You’re spending too much time dealing with IT issues
If you’re getting lost in the hands-on process of trying to resolve lots of IT problems within your organisation instead of helping your business grow, you have a strong case to consider a managed option.
Spending too much time on tasks that you aren’t comfortable with (or an expert in) can be frustrating for both you and the employee with whom you’re resolving issues for. Expert help is often worth its cost in time and opportunity cost.
A Managed IT Support Provider will take all the pressure away from you and give you back the time you’re losing on trying to resolve IT issues you’re not familiar with.
9. You often seek 3rd party technical support
When you can’t resolve IT issues yourself, you often seek outside help. But you don’t do it with any consistency or planning and treat every issue as it comes. This ends up costing you more than you should be paying on call-out charges and fails to build a good, solid pro-active relationship with your 3rd party provider.
With a fixed fee Managed IT Support partner on the other hand, you have the reliability of a fixed-fee operational cost and get the benefits of consistent planning along with the opportunity to work on a pro-active plan of prevention that helps your business remain productive.
Unexpected events are kept to a minimum and support hours are guaranteed within your contract, helping you manage your costs and your IT planning with greater ease.
10. You don’t have a clear roadmap on how to tackle IT obstacles
You’re not aware of the changes on the horizon that will impact your IT. It seems like every day, new technology appears that should make your job easier but because you’re not familiar with the changes in the landscape, either you’re not aware of them or you don’t know how to implement them to your advantage.
This could leave you falling behind your competitors in service provision and in such a high-speed environment, you know you can’t ignore it. But what resources do you have available to dedicate to it?
A Managed IT Support Provider will already be aware of the technology landscape and should already have an ideal roadmap in place for you and other recipients of their service. It is your provider’s job to keep you up to date with changes and recommend a roadmap to keep you in front of your competitors.
10 POINT CHECKLIST:
A quick recap of the signs that indicate you should consider a managed IT support option. Three ticks or more means that you would benefit from Managed IT Support.
- You have old IT infrastructure
- Your IT infrastructure does not grow easily with new staff
- You struggle to keep up to date with new technologies and fail to regularly implement those that can improve your business
- You would benefit from more in-house IT expertise
- You experience a lot of downtime
- You don’t have the knowledge to handle a critical system failure or implement a disaster recovery plan
- You don’t have access to statistics that show you exactly how much time IT support has cost (or saved) your business
- You’re spending too much time dealing with IT issues
- You often seek 3rd party technical support
- You don’t have a clear roadmap on how to tackle IT obstacles
- If you’ve ticked more than three of these issues, your business is ready for Managed IT Support.
If you scored 3 or more, contact us now to find out how we could help you streamline your business and help you grow,
