Is Managed IT the Missing Link to Your Business?

How does your organization govern its technology solutions? If you have an in-house IT department, you may think that you have a better opportunity at keeping your organization safe from a hard drive failure, but that is only if your IT department isn’t already flooded with work. You may find that inserting new solutions is difficult, which wastes your time and resources. What is a small business to do?

The decision that gets the most mileage for your organization is outsourcing the care of your technology solutions to a managed service provider. Compared to the standard break-fix IT model that many businesses unfortunately rely on, managed IT is less expensive and provides a variety of benefits that you wouldn’t necessarily receive via standard break-fix maintenance.

The standard break-fix model of IT management takes a reactive approach to technology maintenance; it relies on problems that are already obvious and present to indicate when you need your technology taken care of. This may 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 extends beyond the costs of the maintenance itself. That 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.

There are times when organizations 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  other areas such as revenue building endeavors. If no one within your business is designated as “the IT guy,” you’ll encounter situations where the average employee is asking higher-ups how to resolve computer problems, which wastes not just your employees’ time, but yours as well. Their time is better spent being productive, but when their technology isn’t working as it should, where else can they go for IT assistance? 

There are significant benefits to working with a managed IT provider. Not only can the managed IT provider act as the de facto help desk for your business, they can also maintain and manage any hardware or software solutions you implement to keep problems to a minimum, thereby streamlining operations and mitigating downtime. Also, if you leave the IT maintenance to your employees, who possibly 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 unnecessary work. When professional technicians take a crack at the problem they have a much better chance of doing it correctly the first time, limiting the risk of problems being repeated.

The missing link for your business could be Managed IT. To learn more, reach out to Macro Systems at 703-359-9211.