IT infrastructures for many businesses are the backbone of them and without the right support in place, things can go wrong very quickly. Businesses are reliant on IT systems to keep them running and if there is no support at hand a system can go offline.
When businesses can’t run they lose money by the minute and depending on the size of the company this could be anything from a few bucks to a few million. In this article, we will take a look at the benefits of hiring an external IT support company so you can decide if your business is at the right place to be thinking about outsourcing it’s IT.
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Reducing Costs With Industry Experts
When outsourcing your IT infrastructure you are going to be hiring a company that specialises in a wide range of services, this could be anything from server management, IT security or even office 365 support which a lot of businesses may need help with.
As a small business owner if you were going to hire someone with all of those skills you would need to either pay a huge salary or you would need to hire multiple people to fill various job roles. For a small business owner this often isn’t feasible so outsourcing your IT support to a company can help as packages are usually built around the number of computers or devices that need to be covered.
Tyler owner of Canadian tech support company Firewall Technical says that “Some companies choose to set up an entire support department only to later regret it when they realise the costs involved compared to outsourcing your IT services.”
If you are a small business owner and need tech support but you’re operating with a limited budget you should consider a managed IT service company to help provide your business with the support that it needs.
Limited Downtime
Most managed IT support companies will offer 24/7 around the clock services which mean there is little business disruption if your infrastructure was to stop working for whatever reason, and depending on your service level agreement fixes can be made very quickly whether its new hardware or software that needs to be installed.
If you compare this to the equivalent of having support in-house you could have more downtime as your inhouse team would be reacting after the incident whereas external IT support providers generally monitor and manage problems before they occur.
They Allow You To Concentrate On Your Business
Most companies choose to outsource their IT because they simply don’t want to be distracted by it. Unless you are an IT company yourself there is a good chance that you don’t care about how your hardware and software runs behind the scenes just as long as it does.
As a business owner, you will face many distractions daily which keep your business from being as profitable as it could be, not having to worry about your IT or technical problems is going to free up more of your time so you can concentrate on your business at hand.
Things To Consider When Hiring An IT Support Company
Hiring an IT support company has many benefits as highlighted above but if you don’t do your research you could end up not getting the best out of your services. According to Forbes, one thing you should consider when hiring an IT support company is if they are local to your business or not.
A local company can help when it comes to replacing hardware quickly whereas your company could experience delays in technical fixes if the company is in a different town or state. At this point, you may even be thinking why do I need an IT support company at all, and that’s a question we hear all the time from small business owners especially those who haven’t had any technical problems yet.
The answer to the above is simple, you may have been fortunate not to need support yet but there will be a time when it will come and you will regret not having it, especially when support services don’t cost that much. On the other hand, if you were to lose data or experience a cyber attack it could cost you up to $129,000 in losses (Source Business.com).
When Does Your Business Need To Outsource Its IT?
Every business is going to decide to outsource its IT infrastructure at different points during their growth and according to Entrepreneur.com a good place to start outsourcing is when you need a job complete but don’t want to take on a full time employee to complete it. Some companies will decide to outsource their work when their staff become overrun or they are getting distracted by work that takes their focus off from their business goals.
If you are interested in even more business-related articles and information from us here at Bit Rebels, then we have a lot to choose from.
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