We live in the Internet age, and basically, every business needs to have effective IT solutions in place to manage their data network, IT infrastructure, and cybersecurity. As a business leader, you’ll have to decide how to deal with this issue.
There are three options to choose from. You can set up your own team of specialists to handle all of your IT needs, choose an outsourcing partner to cover your needs with a managed service or combine the two.
Large businesses and corporations often prefer to build in-house teams of IT professionals to cover their IT support. However, there are several downsides to this approach.
IT specialists are expensive, and building a whole team of them can be a big burden on the company budget, especially in the case of small to medium-sized enterprises.
Secondly, hiring qualified and experienced IT specialists can take a lot of time and resources. If you choose to hire fresh graduates instead, they might have great qualifications, but lack experience in managing enterprise IT solutions.
Due to these issues, many businesses prefer to outsource their IT solutions or to combine outsourcing with a few in-house IT staff.
Let’s take a look at the main benefits offered by outsourced IT support:
1. Lower cost:
As mentioned above, IT specialists are expensive if you hire them full-time. However, if you choose an external partner to cover your IT needs, you only pay for what you use.
For example, if you have a small company and only need a few hours of IT support per week to help your staff manage your company’s IT system, you pay just for those hours, instead of having to hire a full-time staff member or two.
2. Custom IT solutions to meet your needs:
Every business is different and requires a distinct mix of services to cover its IT needs. If you hire a full-time IT specialist, they might not have all the expertise that you need, which means you have to hire a second one with different qualifications.
However, if you work with an external partner, they’ll have all bases covered, and you can select individual services to meet all of your business needs, while only paying for the ones you use.
3. Save time by focusing on your core business:
If you have to hire and train IT, staff, that takes a lot of energy and resources away from what you want to be doing, which is growing your core business.
Also, if you work with a small in-house IT team (or one that isn’t very experienced), it’s likely your IT system will run into problems that they’re not quite sure how to deal with. And while they research the best way to solve the issue, your company is losing valuable time.
In contrast, an external partner specializing in IT services will have plenty of experience dealing with most issues, since they come across them all the time with other clients.
An IT Support company can also provide you with a wide range of experts specialized in different areas. That means they can provide quick solutions without having to research them, while you focus on growing your core business.
4. Get expert advice on how to run your IT:
If you’re not an IT specialist yourself, you probably don’t know exactly what your business needs in terms of IT support.
So if you put together your own IT team, you won’t be quite sure what expertise to look for until a specific need presents itself. If you work with an IT company, however, they can advise you on the solutions that are most important, and what issues you are most likely to encounter.
They will also be able to advise you on compliance issues, and how to keep your cyber security up-to-date. This is especially important if your business accepts online payments or gathers sensitive client data.
This kind of advice can save you a lot of time and money by not having to learn the hard way.
5. Launch new technology fast:
If you’re working with an in-house team, they will likely need quite a lot of time to get up to speed when you want to implement new IT technology in your business.
It’s a lengthy process for your in-house team to research the new technology and figure out how to implement it optimally, while at the same time still having to cover all your other IT needs.
An external partner, on the other hand, probably has all the resources ready to start implementing new technology instantly. Needless to say, this offers your business a strong competitive advantage.
How Can NST Help?
The bottom line is that bundled IT solutions are a bad idea because you aren’t in control of what you’re paying for. That’s why NST provides you with the options that suit what you need now, as well as what you’ll need down the road.
Through our a la carte approach to IT, we’ve been able to aid hundreds of business owners in growing their businesses at the right price and in the right place. When you partner up with us, we’ll help you narrow down the products you need so you don’t end up with what you don’t. We’ll make sure that your IT solutions make sense.