What Are The Key Benefits Of Outsourcing IT Support And Services?
Small businesses are, often justifiably, wary of releasing core components of their operations to outsourced agencies. In a small enterprise, it seems desirable to keep major responsibilities within a core, trusted team. IT needs may be different though. No modern company is without the need for IT support and services, but unless these are part of the company's core offering, there is little reason why these must remain in-house. Indeed, it is useful to consider the significant benefits of outsourcing IT support.
Lower Overheads
Not least of the considerations is expenditure. The expected salary of even an entry-level IT technician is not cheap. Add to that recruitment and training costs, tax, and other employee benefits, and for a small company, that's a significant outlay. Furthermore, the equipment costs when maintaining IT services entirely in-house are considerable. Networks, servers, storage, and security: the bills add up.
Reliance on in-house IT services can lead to sudden and unexpected outlay: hardware and staff replacement or dealing with the clean-up following a security breach. One of the benefits of managed IT services is controlled and predictable expenses, keeping cash-flow issues to a minimum.
Depth Of Expertise
A single in-house IT expert may be very good at what they do, but they rarely find the opportunity to specialize – they have to be a jack-of-all-trades across a wide range of potential IT problems for the business they work in. On the other hand, outsourcing your IT support needs will allow you access to far more skills across multiple experts, for the same costs that you would normally channel into one individual’s salary. An IT employee in your own company can only do so much – and will frequently be too snowed under to action every IT problem that springs up. That typically leads to other staff – not IT experts, by a long shot – having to trial and error their own way out trouble. Over time, this adds up to many lost business hours and a dramatic drop in productivity.
Having an on-site IT support expert is very valuable, especially if you’re dealing with a time-sensitive issue, but complementing your in-house employee with a back-up of outsourced experts could substantially increase your ROI.
Up To Date Skills And Expertise
Cost is not the only reason why managed IT services are a good option for small businesses. With a trusted provider of IT services and support, a reliable level of up-to-date expertise is always on hand. This is particularly important for IT security, potentially a full-time job in itself. Security is a rapidly changing field, with hackers always looking to find new ways to access sensitive data. An outsourced provider with expert knowledge of the latest threats and countermeasures is better placed to defend against these costly incursions.
Better Data Management
Data management is a fundamental specialty of outsourced IT services. In particular, cloud IT support can save a lot of headaches. Again, security is paramount, but also the right basic choices about storage platforms and maintenance are vital. These are worries a small business will be happy to outsource to dedicated experts.
Find Out More
With outsourced IT support and services, a company can focus on its core business processes. The desire to control every aspect of the enterprise is natural for small business managers, but IT services are one domain where handing over responsibility to experts, such as Fuse can really help. Fuse offers a comprehensive service with a per user, per month pricing model. This ensures that costs are managed consistently.
Services from Fuse maintain the stability and security of IT support and liberate small businesses from unnecessary IT worries. Give us a call to discuss your requirements and find out more.
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About the author
Fuse is a Microsoft Partner, based in Northampton. We help organisations of all sizes to maximise IT efficiencies through the use of Microsoft cloud computing solutions.
