An absurd 96% of businesses face these types of expenses during their outages, but IT experts claim that nearly 51% of downtime is able to be avoided.
There are several main catalysts of downtime: Hardware failing, power/internet going out, and a variety of cyberattacks. Believe it or not, IT managed services are fully capable of preventing all of these.
This is is just one of the impactful benefits of managed IT services. If you're interested in what the other ways a managed service provider can help read on!
Before jumping right into the benefits of managed services, we can quickly take a look at what are managed services exactly.
Whenever a business is using IT managed services, they are basically just outsourcing their IT department. This other party, the managed service provider, is now in charge of keeping up with the different systems, hardware, and apps that the business needs to operate. They also specialize in "future-proofing" businesses and anticipating their future needs with different tools.
This should provide a basic enough understanding of a what a managed service provider does. Now onto the specific benefits.
IT outages and power disruption are incredibly common and can cost your business thousands as mentioned above. It simultaneously affects your online sales and communication but it also damages less visible things. Specifically your customers trust or confidence, your brand image, and productivity in the office.
In short, all IT downtime is very disruptive to your business operations.
When you follow the standard break/fix mentality approach to your systems you're inevitably going to experience downtime for one simple reason. If you wait for things to break before calling in someone to fix them, they are guaranteed to break at some point.
On the other hand, businesses that opt for IT managed services can drastically reduce the chances of IT failures. IT managed services providers are responsible for ensuring that your system stays current and well taken care of. If your provider is doing their job, this means that you will have less IT outages due to your systems failing.
Additionally, if your managed service provider is experienced, they can assist in the creation of a disaster recovery plan. Having an effective plan in place is crucial for minimizing the consequences of downtime during an unexpected event.
On thing you can count on from a quality managed services provider is 24 hour support. We're available around the clock, just give us a call. This means that no matter the time of day or night if you have an issue stopping you from working, you can get help immediately.
The real kicker is that you aren't charged a service fee for the additional hours like you would for an in-house IT team. Calling at 4 am for an emergency is nothing to stress at and is covered in the monthly price!
Security nowadays is an extremely important part of businesses. Keeping your data protected can prevent a serious loss of money or even the closure of your business. According the to research, 60% of businesses who experience a hack or data breach go bust within 6 months.
If you think your business is too small for these stats to apply, think again. One of the biggest cybersecurity myths is that small businesses are too small to be targeted by hackers. In reality, more than 50% of last year's cybersecurity attacks were targeted at small businesses.
The takeaway: Even the smallest of businesses need to invest in security to not be an easy target.
Managed service providers often have a dedicated team able to handle breaches and also available for 24-hour monitoring. With the arsenal of detection tools available to the MSP, even if a breach happens it will be stopped before anything critical can happen.
Another one of the many benefits of managed services is the enhanced compliance. Today, businesses are expected to follow an ever-growing range of laws around your data and privacy that can just be difficult to meet fully.
Managed service providers are extremely knowledgeable and up to date on new data compliance laws and can easily implement different measures to meet them.
This allows your team to not have to worry about all the newest laws and figuring out solutions because the MSP has you covered on the IT front.
It seems logical that acquiring a fully-outsourced IT program would cost a fortune compared to an in-house alternative. From the round the clock services, your dedicated manager meeting requests, consistent maintenance and optimization, increased security, it must be ridiculously expensive!
However, it couldn't be more far from the truth.
Managed services are far cheaper than in-house alternatives and are far more effective.
IT managed services providers are streamlined to manage IT systems. Chances are, your business isn't. Managed services providers can take also advantage of economies of scale.
What's more, having an IT department or team on payroll comes with a boatload of costs. Employment benefits, office space, computer equipment, overtime pay, and training are just a few of the most common. Experience having your own dedicated account manager without having to tack on all the costs!
One of the further advantages of managed services is that it gives you access to the kind of knowledgeable experts that likely can't be hired or found easily. Managed services providers are exceedingly versed in IT so they know how to acquire the best agents to fit the role.
Do a little thought experiment: If you were to try and hire an IT manager would you know just what to ask them to see if they were up to the task? Do you know what your business needs in the IT areas?
If not, it's no problem. You can simply choose to let a good managed services provider handle talent sourcing for you.
Obviously, you'd like to increase the size of your business. Why wouldn't you? One thing businesses can get tripped on is effectively scaling your company to handle the extra load, especially in your tech and systems.
Legacy IT systems can be costly and disruptive to your scaling opportunities. Thankfully, by engaging a reliable IT managed services provider, you can skip all of these scaling nightmares.
As your business is growing, so will it's tech needs. IT providers and get great offers for scaling opportunities at a lower cost for you. Besides hardware, hiring more staff to manage the tech can be even more costly.
With an IT managed services provider you'll simply upgrade to a larger package when the time is right, with no strings attached and guaranteed results.
