Top 7 Reasons to Invest in Managed IT Services

The pandemic drove a massive rise in global online sales and that pushed e-commerce adoption by as much as five years.

Quarantines and stay-at-home orders certainly had a large hand in this from the consumer side. With everything around them closed, shopping for anything non-essential and often even for essentials happened online.

On the business side of things, Canadian small businesses followed the example of other nations' small business owners and took things online. This online adoption proved beneficial, but also opened up businesses to all-new IT challenges. Many businesses sought managed IT services as a solution.

Not sure if managed services are right for you? Keep reading for seven reasons you should invest in managed IT services.

1. Better Value

Finding practical ways that you can lower costs is very nearly the Holy Grail of business ownership. Yet, it's often an elusive quarry. Business owners can spend a lot more time looking for ways to reduce costs than finding them.

Reducing costs is one of the essential managed IT service benefits. Managed services help you here in two ways.

Managed IT lets you avoid costs by eliminating the need for an in-house team, along with the salaries and benefits that go with those employees. You can also reduce costs on predictable IT expenditures like consulting, software licensing, and training.

2. Consistent Spending

One of the big challenges with in-house IT is that you often cannot predict what you'll spend. While in-house IT teams do their best to alert superiors when they see signs of a problem crop up, they cannot predict a sudden, catastrophic failure of something like a server.

With managed services, you work out the details of what you'll pay before you get the services. Until the time comes for you to renew your contract, you know what you'll spend each month.

If something goes catastrophically wrong with a piece of technology on the service provider's end, it doesn't come out of your pocket.

3. Cybersecurity

One of the major concerns for businesses is the need for cybersecurity and the lack of professionals to provide it. The global cybersecurity shortage also makes the salary demands for competent cybersecurity pros a stretch for many businesses.

This is particularly troubling for many businesses because cybersecurity is, for the most part, not something you cannot DIY. Even identifying the threats often requires training and experience.

Any managed IT service provider worth the name recognizes the need to offer managed IT security. You get the security support you need to protect your business and customers without taking the huge salary that cybersecurity professionals can easily command these days.

4. Access Expertise

Aside from getting access to someone with cybersecurity experience, working with a managed service provider also gets you access to people with expertise in other areas of IT.

For example, maybe you're trying to decide if you want to move some of your applications into the cloud or upgrade your network infrastructure. Odds are good that the service provider has staff members who can talk to you about those projects.

They can lay out the benefits and pitfalls of leaving things as they are, as well as the pros and cons of making those changes. That allows you to make informed choices for your business.

A managed IT service can also serve as a sounding board for new technologies. Computer technology is very much driven by the shiny object syndrome. Things often look appealing because they're new, not because they're actually better or even beneficial.

A good service provider can help you identify things that provide value.

5. Focus

The less you know about a topic, the more time you spend understanding it and the needs of those who manage it for you. If you aren't well-versed in information technology, there is a good chance you'll struggle to understand what your IT team tells you. The same goes for understanding what they need from you.

All of that saps time you might otherwise spend coming up with and implementing new ideas for your business. When you hand off most of your IT concerns to a managed IT service, that time comes back to you.

It lets you focus your time and energy on the business, rather than on technologies that you only partially understand.

6. Scaleability

When businesses scale up, IT is one of the hardest parts of the business to scale efficiently. It's even harder to scale up IT quickly.

IT infrastructures can prove notoriously delicate things. Swapping out old tech for newer tech often takes time and, if everything doesn't go exactly right, can disable other parts of your IT infrastructure.

With a managed service provider, none of that is your problem. Plus, managed service providers typically work to ensure that you can scale at short notice with careful technology selection.

In most cases, scaling up calls for little more than a phone call or email to the service provider telling them what you need.

7. Disaster Recovery

Granted, disasters often extend beyond your IT needs. Yet, data recovery is often one of the key pieces of getting your business up and running, even if you're doing it out of a temporary building.

Managed service providers can help by providing cloud-based backup services that store your critical data off-site. That way, even if your old offices go up in flames, you can still download your data as soon as you need it.

Managed IT Services and You

IT is often one of the most mysterious areas in any business. Everyone relies on IT, but most people only have a surface understanding of it. Managed IT services provide you with a lot of benefits that make it a good investment.

It can reduce costs and make your spending more predictable. You get better cybersecurity protections, as well as access to experts. You also get some of your time back to focus on your business.

Bulletproof IT offers managed IT services in the Red Deer and Calgary areas. For more questions or more information, contact Bulletproof IT today.