IT support is essential for any sized business, no matter how big or small. Without a connection to this technology, most companies won’t be able to operate effectively and will struggle to compete in an ever-growing, technological world. IT allows organizations to communicate with not just themselves, but with potential clients, and with the advent of the internet, online is now the dominant platform for marketing.
However, having a dedicated IT department is expensive, and also unsuitable for businesses of a lesser size. Managing IT, yourself can take up a lot of resources and time – especially money – which would be better spent in other sectors of the business. This is why outsourcing IT support makes sense as it hands responsibility to the experts, allowing your business to focus on other things such as how to grow your brand. It also has much more benefits than this as well, from reducing costs to increasing efficiency.
Benefits of outsourcing IT support
There is a plethora of benefits to outsourcing IT support which can really enhance your growing business, that once explored makes outsourcing a no-brainer.
- Can reduce costs
By outsourcing IT, you can save money in multiple ways. By outsourcing, you are converting fixed running costs into variable costs, allowing you to budget more effectively. This is because outsourcing companies work on a bespoke plan for what your business needs, meaning you’re only paying for what is required to build the company, eliminating all the extra fluff.
Outsourcing IT also helps by reducing labor costs. There’ll be no need to hire and train specific staff, which can become expensive. It also means that you can focus your recruitment in other areas, hiring people that will benefit the company more.
- They’re experienced experts
Due to the nature of the role, individuals working in outsourcing IT support companies will be far more experienced than staff working in an isolated department for one company. This is because they help multiple brands and businesses, meaning they’re more likely to come across a broader range of IT problems – and more importantly, know how to fix them. Despite how much you can train in-house IT staff, they may lack the skills of an outsourced worker because their experience may not be as broad.
Furthermore, if you’re not IT trained yourself as the business owner, you can’t assure that a potential employee is even qualified. You might not know the qualifications necessary for the role, which could lead to poor, ill-informed hiring decisions. Outsourcing your IT support can eliminate this risk as they’re responsible for their own staffing.
- Can increase efficiency and competitiveness
When managing all your IT services in-house, companies can end up spending a significant amount of time researching, developing, and implementing IT software or programs, which could end up being wasted time better used elsewhere.
An excellent IT support service will have all the resources and equipment needed to implement new projects or software. This means that your company will be able to keep up with the current trends more effectively, boosting your competitiveness in a rapidly changing sector. The time spent in-house while hiring the right people, training them and giving the necessary support to implement the same technologies is eliminated by outsourcing, as these companies will have years of relevant experience straight away, allowing the business to focus on other things.
- Puts you on an equal footing
As stated before, it doesn’t make financial sense for a small business to have its own IT department. Due to this monetary limitation, it can make it hard for these sized organizations to compete, especially when there’s a more prominent company operating in the same market. However, by outsourcing IT, it can help smaller companies act bigger by giving them access to similar technologies and resources, as well as knowledge. If you’re convinced already by outsourcing IT support, check out this IT company Kansas City.
Common IT support services
There are numerous services that IT support companies provide, which can help enhance your business. These range from minor support such as email configuration to more significant changes like networking. Here’s a look at some of the more common services.
- Backup and recovery
Backing up data and documents is a highly beneficial practice that not enough companies do. Having data backed up can really help in disaster recovery, and can ease the devastating effects of a security incident such as a crypto virus infection. By having data backed up, it’s much easier to restore damaged or deleted files, which can get the business back up and running faster.
An outsourced IT department can automate the backup process, eliminating the human element from this, leading to far fewer errors. They can also set up the best recovery protocol for your business, to help you recover quickly in the case of a security breach or failure.
- Desktop support
Outsourcing IT can help you deal with the daily desktop support needs, easily fixing the smaller issues that pop up more regularly. This type of support makes the use of IT more seamless as they focus on issues related to operating systems or applications on the desktop. They also apply patches (small, regular updates) to ensure that desktops run optimally and securely, as well as maintaining antivirus to keep the desktops healthy.
- Email configuration
Email management can become a tricky proposition, especially for a growing business. An outsourced IT support service can provide full email configuration that suits the specific needs of each business, whether that’s to move to a new email platform or implementing email encryption to hide the content of the messages. Outsourced IT can also help keep these email services organized by implementing folders and rules that can create an efficient workflow.
- Cloud support
These days, most prominent organizations are operating on some sort of cloud-based server. Cloud-servers are basically servers where you can store your data over the internet, reducing the need of having physical servers that take up a lot of space. There are numerous benefits to using cloud storage, such as making documents easier to access from multiple devices and removing the need to maintain your own servers, as cloud providers usually take care of that themselves. An outsourced IT support company can aid in the transition to the cloud and evaluate the right pathway to so.