August 28, 2023
Are day-to-day fixes consuming your internal IT team’s resources?
It’s a simple question, but the answer might not be as easy to come by. Internal IT departments are busy places. Typically, everyone is working very hard to ensure everything is operational. All of the systems that make the workday possible depend on IT keeping things up and running. We like to call it “keeping the lights on.”
But in the world of break/fix IT, just keeping the lights on is a full-time job.
What Is Break/Fix?
Put simply, break/fix is a reactionary model for managing business technology, where identifying solutions only happens when there’s a problem. In other words, once something breaks, then we will fix it.
The break/fix model of support was perhaps never ideal, but it was enough to meet many organizations’ needs when technology moved a lot more slowly, cybersecurity risks weren’t rampant, and staff relied on fewer, simpler tools. Every now and then something broke, and IT departments put out the fire.
But now there are too many fires, and responding to all of them can be overwhelming. The result is frequent periods of downtime, which is a terrible strain for most businesses as well as their internal IT teams.
How the Break/Fix Model Affects Your Internal IT Team
When internal IT teams have to spend their time responding to a never-ending series of emergencies, it’s stressful for them, and they’re also not able to take on projects that could actually move your business forward.
In the long run, the break/fix model can lead to burnout and, ultimately, the loss of some of your top IT talent — talent who will be very hard to replace. Chronic understaffing, in turn, will add additional stress to your team, which can lead to even more talent attrition.
Fortunately, there’s an easy way to get out of the endless break/fix cycle for good.
How Managed Services Helps You Get Ahead
A Managed IT Services Provider like Marco can partner with an internal IT team in order to provide technology support and maintenance to businesses currently burdened by the break/fix model. Quite often technology issues that repeatedly plague businesses can be solved once and for all. However, it may require a bit of extra poking around to identify and ultimately resolve the problem.
A Real-World Scenario
We see this one often — a business relies on applications that lag and keep crashing during peak times. Instead of responding to each crash, a managed IT services provider could help resolve the real issue: the infrastructure that simply doesn’t have the capacity to keep up.
Issues like this one (and many, many others) are problems today’s businesses simply cannot tolerate. And no matter how quickly your staff responds to a problem, it frees up a tremendous amount of time if repeated issues could be put to rest.
Furthermore, when it comes to cybersecurity, even fully-staffed internal IT departments typically struggle to keep up. Cybersecurity is a significant source of IT stress, and it’s one aspect of your business you can’t let slide. However, you can easily outsource it. Top cybersecurity risks and countermeasures change frequently, and a good managed provider will have the talent and the resources to keep up.
Why MSP vs. the Break-Fix Model Is a No-Brainer
If you’d like to free up your IT staff so they can better help you strategize for growth, managed IT services might be the ideal solution. You can still retain an in-house staff, but offload certain responsibilities — like help desk support or cybersecurity — to a world-class provider. At Marco, we can also help with one-off projects, like a complex cloud migration, to help your team get ahead and stay there.
As an added bonus, an outsider’s perspective can be surprisingly valuable, and our experts often identify unique solutions your team wouldn’t have otherwise considered. And thanks to our pricing model, our services can be far more affordable than you might think.
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