Many businesses have decided to outsource their IT service requirements. This is down to a number of factors, including the current digital skills shortage. Even more so for smaller businesses. IT support services for small businesses ensures that employees have access to the right technologies to work effectively. With that being said, there are some common challenges that businesses face when outsourcing their IT. Continue reading to see some of the benefits and challenges of outsourcing IT.
Benefits of Outsourcing IT Services
Access to a Variety of Talent
An IT needs a vast skill set to properly manage a Businesses IT infrastructure. Some of these functions include network administration, IT support, systems integrations, migrations and deployment of new technologies. With the ongoing IT skills shortage, it is difficult and expensive for businesses to fill these requirements.
Businesses that decide to outsource their IT services gain access to a team with expertise in multiple areas of IT. This decreases labour costs, whilst ensuring the best technologies are implemented within the business, and support is always available.
Improve Productivity
For businesses that already have in-house IT resource, it can be difficult to assign the team larger projects. Large projects like migrating workloads to the cloud; or other digital transformation projects give the department less time to complete business as usual tasks. For this reason, these larger projects take longer than necessary, and other functions of the business suffer.
Strengthen Security Posture
With the sharp rise in cybercrime over the past 5 years, most businesses understand the need to invest in securing their IT systems. However, for most businesses, hiring an in-house cybersecurity professional is prohibitively expensive. Many IT providers have IT security expertise and monitoring systems to detect and respond to any potential cyberthreats.
Hiring and in house cybersecurity professional can be very expensive. Most IT providers have security expertise and have systems and integrations that will monitor a businesses infrastructure to detect and respond to any potential cyberthreats.
Potential Challenges When Outsourcing IT Services
Limited Flexibility
Some IT service providers only have experience in certain technologies or are locked into working with a specific vendor. This challenge can be solved by having a conversation with any potential IT service providers and questioning why their IT support package is right for the business. Many IT providers will also offer bespoke IT support packages with several technologies to provide all the IT services necessary for the business to work effectively.
Selecting the Right IT Service Provider
With so many IT service providers in the market, it can be tough to find the perfect provider for your business.
One of the most important aspects to consider when selecting an IT provider is their response times and service availability. Regardless of how comprehensive and well set up an IT solution is, there will be times when there will be an issue and a business will require support. During these times, it is essential that an IT provider can respond quickly and solve the problem without significant downtime.
A great indicator of the quality of an IT service provider is to look through customer reviews, testimonials and case studies. Not only does this give you insight into the customer experience, but case studies can help by showing if the IT provider has worked with similar businesses to your own.
Finally, if your business already uses a specific technology or platform, such as Azure, the IT service provider must have technical expertise within this area. This will ensure that they can quickly and easily understand and support your IT infrastructure.
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