Corporate IT
Managed Services is a term used more frequently all the time – by small businesses (SMBs). With SMBs increasingly looking to create new revenue streams and foster existing growth by leveraging digital platforms, today’s small businesses are becoming increasingly savvy on all that today’s business technology innovations deliver.
They are also increasingly savvy on one very important reality:
They are not technology experts.
While some small to mid-sized businesses typically rely on in-house staff with limited bandwidth for IT network management or pay a local IT service provider as needed, this often leaves vital functions such as data integrity, disaster recovery, applications management and network security at risk. The proliferation of mobile technology, tablet use and cloud-based storage is putting an even greater strain on established network management processes. However, managed IT services for SMBs provide affordable and effective alternatives.
7 Benefits of Small Business Managed IT Services
1. Dramatically Reduced Business Risks: Malware, hacking, loss of customer data due to breaches – or natural disasters. Managed IT services afford small businesses the 24/7 security necessary to mitigate risks and, if a situation arises, restore operational processes and data integrity with speed, resources, skill to protect and secure data integrity.
2. Controlled IT Costs: Managed Service Plans can be accurately tailored to your IT requirements – and IT budget. You can achieve a predictable result for a predictable fee – and spend more time focusing on management of your core business. With the right IT service provider, small businesses can experience a true partnership in the protection, maintenance and management of their technology – without the pain of absorbing catastrophic, unforeseen costs.
3. Reduced Labor Costs: Hiring and training IT staff can be very expensive – and time consuming. Managed IT gives you immediate access to trained, certified IT professionals ready to help your business leverage the right technologies for your productivity, efficiency and growth.
4. Expert Assurance: Managed IT Plans give you 24/7 access to business technology experts trained to provide everything from Help Desk support to disaster recovery. Infrastructure management, firewall and virus protection, WAN/LAN health monitoring, a fully secure virtual environment, disaster recovery, scheduled on-site support and more – all available to your business with a managed IT service partner working to keep your data safe, secure and accessible 24/7
5. Security & Compliance: Many of the companies that turn to a managed services provider for management have become accustomed to the firefighting method of tracking and responding to IT events. With the toolsets available to managed services providers, IT performance – even IT incidents – are instantly and automatically reported, allowing remediation to start immediately. The result: Efficiency gains so great that small businesses are surprised by the extent of the inefficiency of their prior system.
6. Reduced Downtime & Risk: Managed services organizations are best able to track and head off technology-related events and remediate them more quickly and efficiently than businesses could in the past. With 24/7 monitoring, MSPs provide systems that actually prevent technology failures from occurring in the first place, which reduces downtime and risk for the firm.
7. Business Planning Insight: Because the managed services provider’s tools are consistently monitoring the performance and capacity of the client’s systems, critical business data is captured and held as historical data. The client has access to this data and can use it to analyze trends in performance or capacity associated with a specific device or database – creating an opportunity for more informed decisions about future IT capacity and performance requirements.