With more and more business systems and processes becoming reliant on IT, companies and organisations are increasingly looking to outsource their IT support rather than putting together their own in-house team for many reasons.
If IT is fundamental to the success of your business and only becoming more so, outsourcing the IT support that you need is a great option to have access to all the resources you need to look after your IT systems whilst allowing you to grow your business in other areas. In the rest of this post, we’ll have a look at how using a Managed Service Provider (MSP) can facilitate this development.
No need for the recruitment process
If you’ve investigated developing your own in-house IT team before, it’s possible that you’ve felt quickly overwhelmed by it.
Whilst as a business leader your talent lies in putting together a team of people who share your business vision and can deliver your products or services in line with this, understanding exactly what’s needed from an IT team in order to support this requires a completely different set of skills. Not only do you need to possess enough technical knowledge to understand what you need from your IT, you also need to know what skills someone in that IT role needs in order to carry it out.
As well as this barrier of understanding exactly what’s needed if you’ve never recruited for an IT team before, the cost can be problematic with the recruitment process itself creating expense, as well as a salary and any benefits as well as ongoing training to make sure they’re constantly at the forefront of their field to help your business stay on top.
Constant access to best practices
Having an in-house team might seem appealing, but one of the things to consider is making sure their expertise stays fresh and relevant in an industry which is constantly evolving.
An example of why it’s important, is that if you hire a team who understand your network inside out and have a good working knowledge of your VoIP phone system, from the point of hire onward, those are going to be their focus unless they want to spend their own time doing a lot of learning.
By working with a Managed Service Provider, you are pairing with IT professionals who are working across systems for many different customers. By doing this, they’re coming across lots and lots of different issues daily, and this is experience which can benefit your IT network immediately if the need arises for it.
A service bespoke to your needs
Innovation and excellent service are two ingredients in the recipe for business success, and they’re what makes your company stand out from the competition.
Every business is unique in this sense and will have completely different IT requirements – whilst there are IT companies out there who provide ‘off the shelf’ products, there are also those who will care about working closely with you to understand your business and the challenges you face. This approach is crucial to MSPs who look to deliver a service tailored exactly to your business needs.
All good MSPs do this by implementing a Service Level Agreement (SLA) which contains what you need from them, and what they get from you. If you’re looking to grow your business, having an SLA can be invaluable in giving you assurance that you will continue to get the support you need – this can be a bit of an issue for in-house teams who have unpredictable factors such as holiday, sickness or resignations to contend with.
Improve cash flow
Cash flow is incredibly important, especially in the beginning stages of a business. Being able to forecast your finances from month to month is vital and a traditional break-fix model of IT support is often accompanied by irregular costs.
With an SLA in place, you’ll be aware of costs and if further services are required in future, you’ll know what these are ahead of time allowing you to be able to plan.
Proactive support
When investment is being made in growth projects, downtime can literally bring a business to its knees when there are no funds to apply in the event of a time where vital applications and processes are rendered inaccessible.
A good MSP will be monitoring your systems all the time, in order to fix issues and reduce downtime. The invention of advanced monitoring tools means that MSPs can alert your MSP to any issues with your network and fix them, often before you have even noticed there is a problem.
What Prodigy offer
We’re a Managed Service Provider covering Somerset, Wiltshire, Hampshire, and Dorset including providing IT Support to Poole and Bournemouth businesses.
We’ve got a pretty unique set of ingredients of Managed Support Services, when implemented together they create our Prodigy cake!
Cake – final-1IT Support
We offer proactive support based on a pre-agreed SLA, completely tailored to your business.
The Cloud
The cloud is a powerful took for file storage and software, as well as ensuring effective collaboration across your business. We offer cloud backups, a hosted email solution, and much more.
Managed Emails
Our cloud-based hosted email solution combines email, contacts, calendars and tasks and makes them accessible across all devices, allowing you to work seamlessly across PCs, laptops and phones. We manage your licenses and mailboxes in our portal adding and removing users when required, making it very easy for you to scale your business.
VoIP Telephone Systems
Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) telephone systems use the internet to make and receive calls – and are a great solution for offering premium business features and scalability at a fraction of the cost of traditional telephone systems.
IT Security and Cyber Essentials Certification
We help businesses with their data security, and assist them with gaining a government-backed Cyber Essentials accreditiation.
Managed Backup and Recovery Solutions
Often overlooked or poorly monitored, but an important aspect of the network, our managed backup and recovery solutions give peace of mind in the event of emergencies. We look after them, so you don’t have to!
Managed Hardware or Hardware as a Service (HAAS)
It’s an industry-wide recommendation that hardware is replaced every five years, in order for it to be working at its optimum and not present as a security risk to your network. This can present a financial challenge, but our Managed Hardware Service requires no up-front investment and is paid for monthly, again making it possible to forecast finances. It’s a lot like leasing hardware, only we take complete responsibility for leased IT equipment, taking care of all updates and security – and once 5 years is over we automatically replace it for you!
