7 Benefits of Hiring IT Managed Services
Research has revealed the average cost of one hour of IT downtime is $300,000.
While a whopping 96% of businesses face these expensive IT outages, IT experts state that up to 51% of downtime is avoidable.
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There are three main causes of downtime. Hardware failure, power and internet outages, and cyber-attacked. And guess what? IT managed services can help your business to avoid all three.
What's more, this is just one of the impactful benefits of managed IT services. Are you keen to learn about the rest? If so, keep reading as we unpack seven ways that managed IT can help your business.
What Are Managed Services?
Before we jump into the benefits of managed services, lets quickly take a look at what are managed servicesexactly.
When a business uses IT managed services, they outsource their IT department. The secondary party (the managed services provider) is then responsible for maintaining and running the systems, hardware, and applications required for the business's IT needs.
What's more, they are also responsible for anticipating future needs and implementing pre-emptive measures for these. If you were wondering, 'what are managed services?', now you know.
1. Less Disruption
As mentioned above, IT outages are a common and costly occurrence. Not only do they impact online sales and communications, but IT outages also erode consumer trust and confidence, damages one's business reputation, and drastically impact productivity.
In short, any IT downtime is highly disruptive to business operations.
Businesses who follow a traditional break/fix approach to IT systems are almost guaranteed to experience downtime. Why? The reason is simple.
If you wait for things to break before calling in someone to fix them, they are guaranteed to break at some point.
In contrast, businesses that opt for IT managed services can drastically reduce the chances of IT failures.
IT managed services providers are responsible for ensuring that your system stays up-to-date and well maintained. If your provider is doing their job, this means that you will have fewer IT outages due to system failures.
What's more, an IT managed services provider who's worth their salt will also be able to help you in building a disaster recovery plan. Having an effective disaster recovery plan in place is crucial for minimizing the consequences of downtime.
Besides keeping your hardware systems and applications in tip-top running condition, a managed services provider will also be able to implement preventative measures, such as cloud-based server applications that can kick in should your on-site servers fail.
2. 24-Hour Support
One of the biggest benefits of IT managed services is the capacity for 24-hour support. Most of the best IT managed services providers—including us—offer round the clock support.
This means that no matter the time of day or night if you have an issue stopping you from working, you can get help immediately.
What's more, even if you have to call up your managed services provider at 3 am, you won't have to pay them extra. In contrast, requesting in-house IT staff members to work through the night on a system issue would result in overtime.
3. Better Security
Security has become an all-important area for businesses. Adequate data protection has become mandatory by law, and businesses who experience breaches can face significant losses or even closure.
According to research, 60% of businesses who experience a hack or data breach go bust in 6 months.
If you think your business is too small for these stats to apply, think again. One of the biggest cybersecurity myths is that small businesses are too small to be targetted by hackers. In reality, more than 50% of last year's cybersecurity attacks were aimed at small businesses.
The takeaway: even the smallest of businesses need to invest in security.
One of the advantages of managed services is it can substantially tighten up your online security.
Managed services providers have dedicated teams that are trained to handle breaches and 24-hour monitoring. They also have an arsenal of detection tools at their disposal. In short, you will be getting professional-grade cybersecurity.
4. Enhanced Compliance
Another one of the many benefits of managed services is enhanced compliance. '
Today's businesses are required to comply with an ever-increasing array of laws surrounding data and privacy. Meeting these requirements is not always easy.
If not, you probably need to consider switching to managed services.
Managed services providers are responsible for keeping up to date with new data compliance laws. They are also responsible for implementing compliance measures.
This means that you and your staff won't have to keep abreast of new laws or figure out how to comply with them on the IT front.
5. Cost Savings
You would think that getting the full outsourced IT package would be more expensive than doing IT in-house. Enjoying the convenience of round the clock support, a team of people waiting to meet requests, behind the scenes maintenance and optimization, and enhanced security and compliance, must come at a price, right?
Nope. In fact, managed IT managed services is often far cheaper than in-house solutions.
IT managed services providers are streamlined to manage IT systems. Chances are, your business isn't. Managed services providers can take also advantage of economies of scale.
What's more, having an IT department or team on payroll comes with a boatload of costs. Employ benefits, office space, computer equipment, overtime pay, and training are just a few of the most common.
6. Access to Experts
One of the further advantages of managed services is that it gives you access to the kind of expertise that you might not have been able to hire.
Managed services providers are versed in IT. Therefore, it is a lot easier for them to vet out qualified, experienced, and capable IT personnel.
Think about it, do you know what questions to ask a potential IT employee? Are you sure you know what it takes to fill the new role?
If not, no problem. You can simply choose to let a good managed services provider handle talent sourcing for you.
7. Scaling Capabilities
Let's make a guess. You're probably wanting to grow your business. What entrepreneur doesn't!
One of the largest challenges when it comes to business growth is effective scaling. Especially when it comes to IT systems.
Legacy IT systems can be costly and disruptive to scale. Fortunately, by engaging a reliable IT managed services provider, you can skip the scaling nightmares.
As your business grows, so will its IT needs. Besides hardware requirements, just hiring an extra staff member can be a large responsibility and expense.
With an IT managed services provider you can simply upgrade to a larger package when the time is right, with no strings attached and guaranteed results.
