Managed IT Support is effectively like any other managed service, which is the outsourcing of a business function to an external third party. This external third party then takes responsibility for the management and performance of the business function, with appropriate reports / feedback to internal staff as required. To follow that through then, Managed IT Support is simply where there is little or no in-house expertise available, and where reliance is placed on the external IT Support Provider for guidance, strategic planning and operational assistance.
A good Managed IT Support company is usually far more proactive than their in-house counterparts! Proactive support is always far better than a standard Break/fix or emergency response service.
Other Advantages of Managed IT Support
When you adopt a managed service, you gain a more efficient way of managing your IT infrastructure. It allows the mundane, day to day running and management of things like patches, updates, virus scanning to be removed from the office management team’s sphere of responsibility. This leaves them with more time to spend actually running the business! Imagine a typical scenario where this works especially well; the owner/manager is doing everything from making business decisions to helping less tech-savvy staff with printing / Outlook problems. Clearly, his/her time would be better spent thinking more strategically about the firm.
A further advantage, and one usually seen on the bottom line profits, is that by having a pro-active support system in place, your business network can become more reliable and therefore have less downtime. In medium sized businesses there might be an argument for a single IT support professional in-house but consider this – you would pay such an individual around £20k per year which in most cases would far exceed an externally sourced IT Support agreement. Just as importantly, the external route delivers a more consistent approach since there would be more than one engineer available, versus the in-house person requiring holiday and even, perhaps, absences through sickness etc.
Cost versus waste, is another really valid point to be taken into account. As you will understand, a managed service has a cost to your business that is over and above the outright purchase of hardware and software. The waste part comes in when you look at what you may try when presented with a particular problem. For example, your team may grumble about a particular service within your network that is causing downtime, slow to respond or even worse affecting your clients. The skill and expertise of a service partner could look at the issue a totally different way to simply just throwing money, server, or new hardware at the issue and in some business cases save you literally thousands of pounds.
If you think your business could benefit from our Managed Service please feel free to give us a call on 01302 540280 or hit the Contact Us button. We would be more than happy to attend your site to discuss your current business challenges and explore how to take a fresh look at everything could make things work better for you.
