July 11, 2022
Outsourced IT is trending. Small to midsize businesses have quickly adopted managed IT as the complexity of today’s software and equipment has gone beyond what their staff can manage and troubleshoot on their own. More recently, enterprise-scale businesses have also been using co-managed IT to complement their team when they identify a knowledge gap or need additional help with cybersecurity.
If you're wondering how your business can benefit from this switch, here are six benefits of outsourcing some or all of your IT services that are pretty hard to ignore.
6 Benefits of Outsourced IT Services
1. Keep Software and Systems Updated
With the pace of change within business technology today, staying up to date on the latest and greatest is no easy feat. Unfortunately, the cost of not staying on top of patches and upgrades can be high. An organization is almost twice as likely to face a ransomware attack if its software isn’t up to date. Many internal IT teams routinely struggle to prioritize keeping software and systems updated. With outsourced IT services, your infrastructure is always kept up to date without additional purchases and investments, and you won’t pay extra for software licenses or cloud service subscriptions.
2. Eliminating Routine Maintenance Expenses
Where is your IT team’s time spent? If you’re not sure, this calculator might be illuminating. Prepare for a shock: routine IT maintenance can have a pretty drastic effect on your bottom line. When you employ one or two full-time IT staff members to handle routine maintenance, patches, firewalls, and upgrades, you're spending much more than the sum of their salaries.
You should also consider the expenses associated with recruiting, interviewing, onboarding, and managing these individuals. You’ll also have to work around vacation time, sick days, training courses, and holidays, and crises often have a way of happening after-hours or on the weekend.
The cost of handling routine maintenance internally can be much higher than outsourced IT services when all is said and done. A recent CompTIA survey indicated that 46% of companies that have made the switch have saved over 24% on their IT costs. Plus, with managed or co-managed IT, you can scale your services up or down as needed. If the last few years have taught us anything, the world can change at a moment’s notice, and the business model that may have been working yesterday no longer applies.
3. Increasing Internal IT Productivity and Reducing Stress
The benefits of outsourced IT services aren't strictly financial. Outsourcing IT services also has a positive effect on your internal IT department. Rather than spending their day-to-day putting out fires and keeping the lights on, your IT staff can focus on the long-term stability of your on-site IT infrastructure.
By outsourcing, your employees have access to reliable help desk support in their moments of need. And at the same time, your IT department gets to stay focused on core responsibilities including network infrastructure installation, maintenance, and improvements for your customers.
As an added benefit, removing day-to-day maintenance and support tasks can improve overall job satisfaction of internal IT staff as they can spend more time on larger, more impactful projects. And if one of the tasks you’re thinking of outsourcing is cybersecurity, you’d be removing a significant source of stress from your internal IT team in one fell swoop.
4. Avoid the Run-Around
When you partner with a single provider that covers every aspect of your IT services, you won't get caught up in vendors blaming manufacturers or one provider blaming another because you have a single provider. That one provider will not spend time blaming themselves, and they're not going to blame you either. They're going to fix whatever problems arise. Plus, the consistency that comes from working with a single provider means you can work with someone who knows you, knows your business, and wants to help.
5. Gain Enterprise-Scale Cybersecurity
Recent cybersecurity statistics are nothing short of alarming. But the truth is, most data breaches and other forms of cybercrime are entirely preventable, as long as you have the specialized knowledge, best practices, and cutting-edge tools to prevent them. No matter how savvy they are, an internal team will often not have the time or resources to devote to safeguarding your data and infrastructure, let alone responding to an attack in a timely fashion. A reputable managed IT provider not only can do these things, but they also do them every day and have the resources and tools to make this tough task manageable.
6. Overcome Talent Shortages
If you’ve been struggling to attract and retain top IT talent, you’re not alone. The industry is growing so fast that even though schools continue to produce well-trained IT personnel, demand exceeds supply and will continue to do so, at least for the next few years. Even if you have a great internal IT team, partnering with an IT provider can supplement your team and add key capabilities without adding staff.
What IT Services Can Be Outsourced?
In addition to providing fully-managed IT services, Marco frequently partners with in-house teams within enterprise-scale businesses to provide help desk support, cybersecurity, backup and recovery solutions, and more. A full menu of co-managed IT bundles, including a ticketing platform and on-demand services, is available here. Marco also offers project-based IT for complex one-off tasks, like large cloud migrations.
Finding the Right Managed IT Provider
Working with IT providers is a big step. So if you’re not sure if managed IT is the right fit for your business, this free checklist can help point you in the right direction. Or you can skip a few steps and check-in with one of our IT experts. Our US-based staff of over 650 certified systems engineers and technical representatives is ready and waiting to work behind the scenes, so your business can truly shine.
