Outsourcing your IT service is one of the smartest business decisions that you can possibly make. Hiring a specialist saves time and effort, reduces costs, and makes the overall operation more dependable. Sure, you would still have to find the right professional/agency, make sure that you can fit their services into your budget, and make it all come together.
Even with the professionals on your side, there is so much managerial work that you need to do in order to make it come together. Here are five benefits of managed IT services to persuade you that this is really worth it.
The cost of setting up infrastructure for your IT team alone can be incredibly expensive. You would have to hire specialists, which is not cheap, organize them or hire someone to organize them (which is even more expensive) and provide them with the necessary tools. When hiring managed services, you get to skip this entirely.
This doesn’t mean that you get to skip the cost of having an IT department. It means two things. First of all, it provides you with a predictable monthly cost. This gives you predictability and allows you to make a more accurate monthly financial forecast. Second, the initial investment will be significantly lower, even though the monthly expense might exceed that of the in-house department.
Scalability is another massive issue, seeing as how you can start with a basic package and switch to premium and pro packages once your business grows. You get to choose how much you’re willing to pay based on your needs, which is a massive operational bonus.
The next benefit you get is the fact that someone competent and qualified for the job is doing the work. Experts behind Katana IT suggest that the biggest obstacle in making your in-house IT department is time. It takes a while to hire and organize the team, as well as some time for them to get accustomed to your working model. With managed IT service, you get it all right away.
To make the long story short, by outsourcing your IT services, you’re skipping a huge transition period. You get the level of competence and professionalism right away. In the long run, the in-house team might be more reliable but there are a lot of situations in which taking a shortcut makes all the difference in the world.
Focusing on core tasks is one of the simplest ways to improve the productivity of your team. Just think about a task that you are doing for a while now. How long did it take to do it when you first started and how long does it take now? The longer you do something, the more competent you will get.
Sometimes, you’re not taking a professional to do something because you can’t do it yourself. You do so in order to save time. Competence is the key to successful time management and it works both ways. Not only will your IT suffer because you’ve taken someone off the core task to handle it – the core task will suffer, as well. In other words, let people do what they’re best at and when a new task arises, outsource it to a specialist.
Innovation in the IT industry is faster than in any other field. New technologies and trends (both in terms of hardware and software) are appearing on a daily basis. This is why you need someone who can adapt to the new system as quickly as possible.
Adopting a new trend can change everything. A new update is not necessarily just a new dashboard layout. There may be new functions, new concerns, new bugs, etc. When it comes to digital marketing, for instance, search engines and social media algorithms are constantly getting updates. Every time this happens, you need to reinvent your strategy. The situation is not much different with IT either.
Every new task means a new obligation for your teams and management. It also means more places and instances where something can go horribly wrong. So, in order to minimize this type of risk, you need to figure out how to make your infrastructure simpler. By outsourcing, you’re delegating the risk (not just the task).
Security risks are real in the IT industry and a layman may not be ready for all that they’ll face in this field. You need someone on their A-game in order to minimize the risk that your enterprise is facing.
The risk of getting outcompeted is one more negative factor whose consequences a managed IT service can significantly lower. This is something that we’ve already mentioned in the previous section but it’s more than worth mentioning once more.
In the end, just keep in mind that reducing costs and simplifying your business model are on their own a reason enough to go for managed IT service. Once you add some other items to the list, it will quickly become pretty high on your priority list.
