Whether you need to grow your IT infrastructure, are facing an increase in business, or are in startup mode, outsourcing all or part of your IT makes good business sense. Outsourcing to a managed services company can help your business grow by focusing your revenue and maximizing your expenditures. Following are five ways that managed IT will improve the efficiency of your business.
Control IT Costs
It may be counterintuitive to try and control IT costs by spending money on outsourcing, but the key term is control. To function efficiently in today’s business environment, you need to be able to keep up with demand at peak times and run operations 24/7. To do this in-house means a massive investment in equipment and personnel. By outsourcing your IT during high demand periods and/or and letting managed IT services handle your call center or data operation nights and weekends, you can maintain your current, lean IT staff and infrastructure, while still meeting the demands of your clients.
Maintain an Experienced Team
Technology is constantly changing and your team needs to keep up with the latest skills and expertise. But training is expensive, not to mention the downtime required to send your personnel for training and certification. For instance, to get advanced certification in Cisco routers can cost over $10,000 and take a year to complete. By hiring a managed services company to handle specialized needs, you are able to keep abreast of the latest technology and employ a team of experienced and knowledgeable IT personnel without the burden of training.
Focus on Your Core Business
Your business requires technology to get the job done, but technology is not your core business. Any time or money you spend managing technology is taken away from the focus you need to run and develop your business. Managed IT services puts the focus on technology into the hands of trained experts and allows you and your employees to concentrate on your core competencies.
Reduce Risk
Many business owners feel that keeping their IT in house means tighter control, but it also means greater risk. Think about the loss of revenue involved in a power outage or an interruption in telephone or internet. Weigh the intangible cost of losing your company’s reputation in the event of a security breach or loss of your client’s data. By outsourcing all or part of your IT, you are distributing your operation to multiple locations, minimizing this risk. In addition, a managed operations center is run 24/7 with multiple redundancies in power, communication and data backup.
Compliance and Security
If you thought training was expensive, wait until you look at security compliance and certification. Because of the recent, highly-publicized data breaches, clients are more security conscience than ever. More RFPs are asking for PCI and other specialized security standards. Compliance with these standards is a three-step process. First, you need to understand the scope and specific needs. This is a daunting task. A single document from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) covering a single standard is almost 500 pages of highly esoteric language. Second, you need to spend the money required to comply with these standards. Finally, after spending the time to understand the requirements and the revenue to implement them, you still need to pay someone to inspect all of this and issue certificates of compliance. Outsource your data warehousing and utilize Software as a Service (SaaS) resources and you can check yes to those RFP questions without the huge expense.
