Managed IT Services Present Opportunities

How does your business manage its technology solutions? If you have an in-house IT department, you might think that you have a better shot at keeping your business safe from a hard drive failure, but this is only if your IT department isn’t already overwhelmed with work. You might find that implementing new solutions is tricky, which wastes time and resources on your part. What’s the small business to do?

The choice that gets the most mileage for your business is outsourcing the care of your technology solutions to a managed service provider. Compared to the traditional break-fix IT model that many businesses (unfortunately) rely on, managed IT is more affordable and provides a plethora of benefits that you wouldn’t necessarily get through traditional break-fix maintenance.

The break-fix model of IT management takes a reactive approach to technology maintenance, relying on issues that are already clear and present to indicate when you need your technology taken care of. This can lead to unnecessary downtime, meaning that your employees won’t be able to work while you’re waiting for maintenance. The costs of the break-fix model extend far beyond the costs of the maintenance itself. Not only can include large expenses such as a replacement server, or the cost of all the accumulated downtime during which your employees cannot do their jobs.

Sometimes businesses get around the loophole of hiring an internal IT staff by taking an IT department’s responsibilities and handing them to the other workers--workers whose time is better spent on revenue building endeavors. If nobody within your company is designated as “the IT guy,” you’ll encounter situations where the average employee is asking higher-ups how to resolve issues--a situation that wastes not just your employees’ time, but yours as well. Their time is better spent being productive, but when their technology isn’t working properly, who can they go to for help?

This is the major bonus of working with a managed IT provider. Not only can the managed IT provider act as the de facto help desk for your organization, they can also manage and maintain any hardware or software solutions you implement to keep issues to a minimum, thereby streamlining operations and mitigating downtime. Plus, if you leave the IT maintenance to your employees, who likely won’t know what they’re doing, you’re opening the doors for even more downtime caused by solutions not being implemented properly, introducing more work that needs to be done. When professional technicians do the job, they have a higher chance of doing it right the first time, reducing the risk of projects being repeated (a considerable waste of time and resources).

Managed IT might just be the missing link for your business’s technology needs. To learn more, reach out to SMART Services at 586 258-0650 .