Are Managed IT Services Right for Your Company?

It can be a difficult prospect to get a small business owner or manager to accept the fact that managed IT services might be a good move for his company. Most owners of small business companies have gotten to the point where they were successful by relying on their own judgment and their own capabilities.

That makes them reluctant to place the entire future of their business technology in the hands of someone else, even if that someone else is an expert in the field. This is easy to understand, because owners and managers like this have achieved a certain level of success in business by being in control, and they have a natural aversion to giving up that control.

However, there are certain ways to appeal to such owners and managers, even if they are generally reluctant to relinquish control of their IT service and the business technology which supports the company. ‘Type A’ personality managers for instance, are generally very independent people who have highly competitive natures. By appealing to the competitive nature of a Type A personality, and by showing them how managed IT services provide a competitive edge over their rivals, they can sometimes be won over.

Type B personality managers usually find static routines distasteful, and they prefer to be more creative and more innovative in finding business solutions. This is a tailor-made situation for the cutting-edge advantages offered by managed IT services, because it appeals to the creative nature of the Type B manager.

Regardless of personality types though, any manager who is considering a commitment to managed IT services, will need to be able to see the security, efficiency, and stability which the process brings to their company. In addition to seeing the value proposition which managed IT services provides for companies, the company owner or manager has to recognize that having IT infrastructure completely handled for them is a major undertaking that they need to be completely committed to.

Here are some other considerations that a business owner or manager might want to consider before plunging in to managed IT services.

Is Your Business Large Enough?

Some business owners have the idea that their company simply isn’t large enough to warrant managed IT services, possibly because the total number of employees and the company is less than 10, and most IT work is carried out on laptops and spreadsheets.

In truth however, any size company regardless of how many people are employed, is large enough to have its IT services managed by an efficient third-party provider. Any business will run much more efficiently when technology is maintained and monitored by experts in the field.

It’s also worth considering that any business which is online is subject to cyber attack by the criminal-minded individuals who abound on the Internet, and if you don’t have the expertise to protect your company against these possible incursions, you could suffer serious damage. Even a small company would benefit by having its business-critical data protected by a third-party which is expert in cyber security.

How Does Managed IT Services Save Money for Your Company?

Many small business owners have the notion that all investment should be earmarked for marketing and sales, as well as toward improving their core operations, rather than for a non-income generating function like IT. These are the kinds of managers who only worry about technology when it’s not working, or when it has somehow become broken.

For these managers, technology can be repaired by calling in a service technician when some kind of disaster strikes, or by simply replacing the broken equipment at the local hardware store. The problem with an approach like this, is that when you just wait for equipment to break and call in a service technician, you’ll be paying top dollar for the time that service technician is on the job.

On top of a steep hourly rate, you’ll also have to pay for replacement of any hardware which is broken, and it may not even be possible to replace the hardware immediately. The bottom line on why this approach is far less than ideal, is simply that it’s a reactive strategy rather than a proactive one. A proactive strategy is what a managed IT provider would implement, constantly monitoring equipment for potential failure.

Another obvious flaw with this strategy is that your servers and your applications may run slowly, and your employees’ computers may take forever to boot up at the beginning of a day, simply because they’re not optimized for performance. You may also have machines which are infected with malware and you don’t even know it.

When you have non-technical employees dashing around your facility trying to fix technical problems, you will definitely lose efficiency and productivity from your workforce. One last problem with the ‘run until it breaks’ approach is that your customers will undoubtedly notice how slowly you respond to them, how poor your technology profile is, and how responses are generally mismanaged. Even worse, if your system experiences downtime often enough that customers notice it, they may just take their business elsewhere.

Managed IT services will avoid all these nasty scenarios, and save your company a bundle of money, just by being proactive, and by doing things right ahead of time.