As a Houston business owner, your focus must stay on the business. But you can never overlook the health of your IT infrastructure sitting at the heart of the business. No matter the size of your business or your IT support, your business health heavily depends on the health of your technology infrastructure.
The IT Industry marketplace and community education source known as Spiceworks shows where the challenges are for businesses when it comes to IT. According to their 2020 State of IT: Industry Trends Survey of more than one thousand IT buyers, 50 percent say the biggest challenge businesses face is keeping IT infrastructure up to date. The same percentage see balancing IT tasks and improvement projects as an equal challenge.
By outsourcing your small business IT to an experienced Managed IT Services Provider (MSP) your small business can overcome these and other challenges. These tangible benefits are not abstract. They improve your businesses operations in real ways that strengthen the bottom line while lowering costs. Here are just five of the main reasons to outsource your small business IT.
1. Lack of full-time IT Support
It’s likely your small business doesn’t have the IT budget for full-time IT staff or lacks the ability to higher as many staffers as you need. By partnering with an outsourced MSP, you get access to an expert IT team, services, and tools to support your internal IT or provide complete IT services. This comes at a fraction of the costs of even one full time IT staffer while lowering costs in many other ways.
2. Lower Predictable Costs
Most small businesses have small IT budgets and hope for the best when it comes to unexpected expenses. Having an MSP for small business IT mitigates the heavy cost of an emergency IT project or a downed network, which can wipe out a yearly IT budget.
Managed Services work proactively rather than reactively to monitor, predict and prevent technology emergencies that stop your business cold. This approach helps change needed technology from costly capital expenses to manageable operational expenses. Options such as flat rate fees for routine maintenance and IT assessments can lower costs by finding problems before they lead to downtime. This support can reveal simple fixes and cost-effective new technology implementations that improve business operations, processes, and the bottom line.
3. Eliminate Expensive Downtime
While an hour of downtime can cost your business thousands of dollars, you may not know how much you’re losing because of:
- Inefficient network or server processes
- Slow computers
- Application patches
- Malware, viruses and other cyberthreats
These all work to slow down your workforce in ways that costs you incrementally and often imperceptibly. You don’t immediately see the death from a thousand cuts leading to big losses. It’s only when you look at the accumulation of the minutes of downtime over dozens or hundreds of workers 365 days a year because of slow or inefficient technology processes.
The right MSP can provide proactive IT services to prevent downtime in all its seen and unseen forms slowly draining your business of productivity and profits. Those services include vital IT infrastructure assessments, security patch management, and system monitoring support. This hardens your network against hackers (inside and out) and protects your business’ bottom line.
4. Access to Affordable New Technology That Improves Your Business
Most small and mid-market businesses have small or no internal IT team, so they lack the technology vendor relationships needed for vital technologies at the best price. The right MSP brings a host of strong vendor relationships with leading providers. Because of their economy of scale with a client base, they can get technologies at the best prices.
They also have invested in the training and accreditation on these systems across their staff. This helps your small business leverage technologies that make you more competitive, efficient and scalable while being prepared to open new lines of business. They also bring the ability to consult on technology decisions based on real-world business needs. The goal is to help you make the right choice, implement it quickly, and optimize the operation of your business in ways that matter to you.
5. Access to an Experienced and Skilled IT Team
Most small business on-site or internal IT support are IT generalists that may not have the expertise in broader technologies including:
- Cloud services (consulting and migration)
- Security Services (identity management, patch management firewalls, etc.)
- Backup and disaster recovery (BDR)
There are a host of other technologies driving the modern business in the digital age. Outsourcing your small business IT brings skilled experts in digital technologies that can:
- Transform your business processes
- Lower costs
- Improve productivity
These are just several of the many reasons why you should outsource your small business IT to an MSP expert team. Every aspect of your IT infrastructure plays a critical role in the competitiveness of your business and its bottom line. While the benefits that come with outsourcing small business IT are clear, achieving these results depends on choosing the right MSP.
Contact us at 3 Qube Consulting for a free consultation.