Optimizing staff in your business
In today’s businesses, keeping up with the competition while minimizing operational costs is a might be a nightmare. In the case of small and medium scale businesses (SMBs), with an optimized number in staff who already have their plates full, finding time for implementing newer business technology and maintaining them would be a challenge. 
A great solution for this employed by many companies is outsourcing their operations to other companies. With newer technology available, these third-party companies can manage your operations with greater efficiency and security and at a lower cost.
IT Managed Services explained
Through these services, you partly or fully handover the management of your IT sectors, such as network management, disaster recovery and desktop management to a company who charges you for the volume of work they handle. This is much cheaper than investing in in-house facilities. With more complex applications and systems being acquired by small and medium scale businesses, these are beginning to turn towards these services. A recent survey done reveals that 46% of SMBs have outsourced their IT needs, while many have plans to outsource soon.
How these Managed Services assist business expansion
By handling the load on IT, planning required in maintaining and managing this sector of your business is minimized, allowing more time and effort to be invested in the expansion of the business. The number of employees can be adjusted accordingly or redirected towards other branches of your business, which will have a direct impact on the revenue.
With the expansion of your SMB, your IT needs become more complex and you will need more than an employee with good tech knowledge (which happens in many cases of SMBs with small numbers in staff) to handle problems that will arise. The need to employ a full-time IT expert or Management Services company will be imminent. However, a service providing company may prove to be cheaper as they only charge for the volume of services performed whereas a fulltime in-house employee may prove expensive if the probability of facing a problem is low.
Protecting your business through Managed Services
With a lot of top-notch hacking and cyber–attacks going on today, your business may be vulnerable to one of these. Employing an on-site team to manage these threats may be impractical for an SMB considering the cost and the time needed to filter out the skills and expertise needed. Since a cyber–attack may occur at any time and without warning, having a third-party company monitoring you 24/7 all year around is advisable. Selecting a Managed Services provider with vast experience in the field of cybersecurity will protect you in the case of an attack, as they will be able to quickly detect and react to the situation.
Lower costs
As mentioned before, the savings are great through Managed Services as no investments for new software and servers are needed. With Service companies offering monthly subscription schemes, budget planning will be easy as the cost is fixed. With flexibility on scaling your IT sector, you can scale up or down as required and pay for the volume of services you acquire.
However, though the advantages of IT outsourcing seem vast, depending on the size and nature of your business, it may or may not be practical. When it comes to data confidentiality, company rules may conflict with complete IT management. Some booming SMBs in the U.S has opted for partial outsourcing, where combined services in both IT and business sectors are employed. To find out what’s most suitable for you, feel free to contact us.
