If you’re used to doing things a certain way at your business, making changes to a “winning formula” can feel counterproductive. Whether your on-site hardware and infrastructure has been updated with digital systems and services, or not, you might think the systems you have in place are just fine for your business.
But what if there was an option to take away the dull, repetitive tasks that don’t stretch the talent of your team, and to give back time to invest in your business? What if this allowed you to cut costs and simplify convoluted processes at the same time?
This is the aim of managed services. You’re busy, and your team is a skilled group of IT professionals – could they be managing their workload better? Could their day-to-day activities be more rewarding (while also improving the security of your organisation)?
If you’re still not sure about managed services, here are 5 advantages you might be interested to know…
Advantage #1: Tapping into expertise
If you’re a SME, or even if you’re a bigger organisation, you might benefit from being able to outsource knowledge and expertise to an independent group.
It’s not that your team doesn’t know its stuff; it’s that a new perspective from a dedicated provider could really add value. Having a contact whose sole purpose is to stay up to date on the latest IT industry developments and help apply them to your business is a great way to ensure your connectivity, security and other IT functions are as efficient as they can be.
Not to mention, having experienced technical 24/7 support on hand to answer your questions or perform routine checks for you, can reassure and free up your team to perform other, more complex tasks.
Advantage #2: Hand over maintenance and upgrades
One of the most time consuming tasks in IT support is managing maintenance and upgrades. We often hear it from customers: it’s a time vacuum, and means experienced staff are taken away from other more complex tasks..
Yet upgrades and maintenance are essential to the proper running of your business: without them, you’d be risking the security and integrity of your organisation. So one solution is to give these necessary tasks to a managed service provider.
No longer would you have to worry about whether your software is up to date or if the technologies you’re using are still fit for purpose; you’ll be exposed to a greater range of solutions and, crucially, those that you may not have afforded previously. With a managed IT service, you can rest assured that your systems will be upgraded for you, with constant monitoring and maintenance included.
Advantage #3: Manage your costs
Often everything is fine with your costs… until you encounter a problem. How many times has a “small IT issue” spiralled out of control, with costs escalating along with it? When you need to suddenly reach out for extra support, it’s easy for costs to increase at a rate you hadn’t expected.
Take the element of surprise out of IT troubleshooting – which will help you manage your budgets – with support from a managed IT service. Instead of incurring large, irregular payments to sporadic IT issues, regulate your expenses with a single, manageable monthly fee.
This way, you always know what’s coming and have the control to increase or decrease your package according to what you need over time, as your business grows and evolves.
Advantage #4: Divert time back into your business
What could you achieve with a full IT team that’s focused on providing an excellent service for your business… not on repetitive, manual tasks which could be outsourced?
By leaving the management of your IT services to an external team – such as security, disaster recovery, the cloud and connectivity – you can reduce the amount of time that in-house departments have to spend on these often frustrating tasks.
Where could that capacity go instead? Would you need as many staff working in your team all at once, or could you streamline your team? What exciting projects could you start running instead, which currently end up on the backburner? The sky really is the limit.
Advantage #5: Simplify contact with providers
It’s likely you already work with some external providers. Whether it’s product or service suppliers you rely on, managing the workload, capacity and administration of these providers can become a job of its own.
A managed service provider can take over day-to-day contact with these numerous suppliers. Instead, they become your single point of contact for any issue, rather than you having to reach out to multiple email addresses and phone numbers.
Not only is this less fuss and time for you, but it leads to a reduction in management and administration overheads – what’s not to love?
If you’ve been thinking about implementing a managed service at your business, we hope the five advantages above offer a start to answering any questions you might have about the implications of this model. You might still have more questions about how this would look at your organisation – if so we’d love to speak with you.
