For small to medium-size businesses, maximizing current technologies is a must to remain relevant and competitive. With little to no experience in Information Technology, this is extremely challenging. The going only gets tougher when budget constraints come into the picture.
Thankfully, with outsourced IT services, business owners don’t have to lose sleep over finding simple, flexible, and affordable solutions for their business needs. Dedicated IT support can help take any business to the next level with talent, experience, resources, and much more.
Here are 8 benefits of having dedicated IT support by your side that can translate to increased productivity for your business!
1. Experienced and Qualified Personnel
If you intend to hire IT personnel in-house, you’ll need to have a fair understanding of job requirements, roles, certifications, and industry jargon. While this can be a challenge in itself, there will be more hurdles to overcome! Consider that qualification doesn’t equal experience, and it’s unlikely for one person to be aware of solutions to the various issues that might arise in your setup.
In addition to this, in-house IT staff are more likely to lead an isolated existence. You might also have to spend money on regular training and take steps to maintain current certifications. Conversely, hiring dedicated IT support in the form of managed services means you have access to a team of professionals who are well-versed with all possible solutions to myriad problems.
Providers also ensure their employees are up-to-date on training and certifications, so you don’t have to bear these extra costs. Needless to say, having IT professionals trained in specific areas on your team is guaranteed to help your business grow.
2. Effective and Efficient Technology
The right technology can improve employee productivity and encourage innovation by facilitating communication, knowledge sharing, and collaboration. However, simply using complex technologies cannot deliver; for productivity and subsequent business benefits to be realized, it’s important that technology be planned, implemented, and maintained in the right manner.
Since employee productivity is directly linked to the effectiveness and efficiency of technology, a stable network helps ensure fewer intermittent connectivity issues and seamlessly integrated systems. This eventually translates to a decrease in unproductive hours.
Calling in an hourly technician to carry out repairs and resolve issues can be expensive. What’s more, a technician might not be able to respond in a timely manner! On the other hand, with managed IT services, you benefit from a stable network that lets your business’ productivity continue unaltered.
3. Access to Specialized Talent and Resources
Whether your business is expanding rapidly or you have time-sensitive projects on hand, outsourcing IT tasks to a dedicated team allows you to access specialized talent and resources that are otherwise unavailable. This is especially true for small to medium-size businesses that cannot support their environments in a cost-effective manner!
Apart from being raring to go with a team of individuals armed with cross-sectional IT knowledge, IT services providers make specialized expertise easily available to businesses at affordable prices. Also, IT processes are complicated in nature and see rapid changes, making it hard for businesses to cope up.
It definitely makes sense to not waste time and resources trying to build and maintain processes in-house!
4. Reduced Downtime
Unplanned downtime can wreak havoc on your business. First and foremost, productivity plummets as your employees are forced to go idle. So while they are still being paid for that period of time, there are no sales happening and no communication with customers is underway.
Speaking of customers, the new-age breed is alert and informed, and expects immediate responses and results. When you’re facing downtime, your website and e-mail aren’t working as intended, meaning your customers don’t get what they’re looking for, costing you sales and goodwill.
These setbacks extend into the repair period as well. Depending on the issue, unplanned downtime can be time-consuming, and you could end up paying a lot of money to get your systems up and running. With dedicated IT support by your side, you don’t have to worry about such losses and expenses as you have a smooth-running setup that doesn’t come with a surprise price tag!
5. Round the Clock Support
When you hire support staff in-house, you can’t do with just one IT employee. And most small to medium-size businesses cannot afford to hire a team of trained and skilled IT professionals full-time!
Even if you try to manage with a couple of IT employees, you’ll have to ensure at least one of them is always present on-site to deal with issues that crop up. Note that there will always be the possibility of operations being affected due to unplanned leaves or prolonged absences.
Managed IT services providers can offer uninterrupted support to your business 24/7. This empowers you to give your clients the best service round the clock. Most importantly, service providers have a team of professionals working for them, which simply means that you don’t have to compromise on productivity at any time of the day or night!
6. Proactive Maintenance
When you provide round the clock service, issues of all sorts can arise at any hour. With just a couple of IT employees handling all concerns, it’s going to be impossible for them to prevent problems from arising in the first place. Since most of their time is going to be spent in putting out fires, they’ll just end up in a vicious circle from which there will be no escape!
A good IT support Cleveland provider can not only offer you uninterrupted monitoring but proactive maintenance too. Providers prevent disruptions in daily operations and keep your business safe from security attacks by keeping your systems updated and scheduling patches at regular intervals.
Because issues are identified quickly, escalations and downtime can be easily avoided. Moreover, maintenance and repairs are scheduled keeping in mind your peak business hours. As such, you won’t have to worry about your productivity levels dipping at any time.
7. Security
Maintaining critical information like health and medical records is vital to the integrity of any business dealing with such data. Storing and managing data is not a simple matter given that security threats are aplenty in the form of malware and hackers.
IT services providers offer several security measures like anti-malware and anti-spam solutions, firewall monitoring and management, managed anti-virus, and more to mitigate risks, protect data, and head off any security attacks. Providers keep your data safe from natural calamities too by offering cloud storage. Regular backups, reporting, and testing schedules help ensure that your data stays fully recoverable!
By hiring dedicated IT support, your business productivity won’t be impacted due to security threats. Also, you get to relax knowing that all your confidential data and valuable records are in safe hands. Do check out this cybersecurity e-book for more information!
8. Ability to Focus on Core Tasks
There’s no denying this: People are happiest when they are doing what they do best. And happy people are bound to be more productive!
Hiring an IT services provider means none of your non-IT employees are involved in tasks they know nothing about. Since they don’t have to spend time trying to figure out things they don’t understand, they have more time on hand to focus on their primary tasks. Without distractions, they can give their best at work!
Having dedicated IT personnel on the team also means that you get to focus on your core business. No more stressing over data security, fixes, and implementing new technology; just leave it to the experts!
Conclusion
Dedicated IT support can not only help your business level the playing field with your competitors, but also enable you to recognize competitive advantage! With real world experience and latest technologies implemented successfully to fit your business model, there’s no stopping your business from growing.
With the information provided here, you now know you can achieve so much more with an outsourced IT services provider. So get going and do what’s right for your business!
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