What Are Managed IT Services?
One of the current buzzes among small businesses is Managed IT Services. Not because it’s new, but because it’s increasingly accessible for small businesses like never before. Historically, these services were only available to large companies, but now smaller businesses can take advantage of the same features and benefits enjoyed by a Manulife Financial or a Hewlett Packard.
Managed IT Services allow you to offload IT operations to a service provider. For most business owners, this is an alluring escape from head splitting migraines. Growing a business usually means spending more time attending to the responsibilities of maintaining IT infrastructure. This is an all too frustrating loss of otherwise productive time. Whatever your business, it’s unlikely you want to spend your time calibrating the auxiliary conduit so that the capacitors diagnostic don’t by-pass the flux vortex, right? There’s no revenue in that.
With these services, you relinquish responsibility for monitoring, managing, and problem resolution of IT functions. You put this responsibility into the hands of professionals better suited to keeping your IT operations smooth and seamless. Common examples of Managed IT Services include alerts, security, patch management, data backup and recovery. IT specialists undertake periodic review of systems to prevent major issues before they impact your business.
Why This Matters!
The increasing IT complexities of a growing SME (Small Medium Enterprise) make it more likely for business owners to become overwhelmed and fall behind the needs of the IT infrastructure. This makes companies vulnerable to outages resulting in a loss of productivity and revenue.
Managed IT Services means eliminating interruptions due to IT issues. SME’s need to concentrate on running the business, maximize employee productivity, and forget that flux capacitors even exist. Picture the Millennium Falcon with a professional maintenance team.
In the end, Managed IT Services are cheaper than break-fix ambulance services even before you factor in the cost of the business’s downtime. Consider: 46% of the current users of Managed Service Providers have reduced their annual IT expenditures by 25% or more as a result of their shift to managed services, with 13% experiencing 50% or more IT savings.
Your IT Managed Services Operations Centre will know of an issue before it becomes a user symptom. They will resolve the issue before it impacts your business. But these services are more than just preventative. They improve your productivity by giving your employees and customers an improved user experience, and also save you money with expert guidance on the most cost effective and efficient business solutions.
Of course you don’t have the sweeping needs of a massive business! Never bloat your operating costs with packages containing services you don’t need. Any Managed Services Provider should be ready to customize solutions that achieve your business objectives. An IT Managed Services solution can improve productivity, alleviate security fears, prevent lost data, eliminate network failure and even help you demonstrate compliance with regulatory bodies. With a fully monitored system, SME’s can do what they were meant to do: take care of business.
