How Central Texas Businesses Can Benefit from Managed IT

Nowadays, businesses seeking out IT services have a choice between two options: frequent a business that offers one-off tech support on a case-by-case basis, or subscribe to a managed service provider’s continuous and proactive support. Many small businesses might incorrectly assume that this latter option is reserved exclusively for large businesses and corporations… but this is very much not the case.

In fact, small businesses can—and do—see a variety of benefits from the managed service approach. Let’s discuss some of these benefits in greater detail.

First Off, Cost Benefits

Granted, it may seem counterintuitive that paying a subscription fee would be fiscally wiser than paying for IT support when something goes wrong, but it’s important to look at the whole picture.

While it is possible that a business could avoid any kind of IT mishaps and postpone any investments for an extended period of time, it is highly unlikely that this would be the case. Depending on the circumstances, a business might need to call in support for any number of cases. Everything ranging from unexpected email issues to printer problems can cause a bottleneck in your productivity, and end up costing you time and money. Under the more traditional break/fix approach to IT maintenance, that’s another bill for each call.

However, with a managed service agreement in place, one monthly fee covers effectively all the support that a business might need, making it a far easier expense to budget for. This helps the business to optimize its operational costs, allowing more flexibility and improved spending into improvement-focused initiatives. The long and short of it, there are massive benefits comprehensive IT management brings to Austin businesses.

Second, Proactive Maintenance

On a related note, the subscription model also adjusts how IT maintenance can be delivered. Traditionally, IT services were requested as the need for them arose when a business experienced an issue and would call in their provider to remedy the problem, also known as break/fix. There could therefore easily be a significant amount of time between the notification to the provider and the issue ultimately being resolved. Comparatively, a primary focus of managed IT services is to catch burgeoning issues through remote monitoring (ideally before they begin to impact the business’ operations). 

We like to look at it this way—if you know the person fixing your computers is charging you by the hour, you probably want that person to get the job done and sign off, as opposed to sticking around to check to see if your patches and updates are up-to-date, or that your backup is working as expected, or that your security infrastructure is configured properly. You might even want to ensure all of that, but it’s so easy to put critical stuff like this off. This work needs to be done regularly.

This kind of proactive maintenance allows the businesses subscribed to managed services to avoid the repercussions of IT issues as the causes can be identified and eliminated. Returning once again to the cost benefits, expensive downtime can be largely mitigated thanks to this maintenance. Here are five advantages managed IT brings to your business.

Third, Cybersecurity Preparedness

Once again tying into our previous point, cybersecurity needs to be a priority for Austin-based businesses. We’ve recently touched on how cybercriminals are targeting Texas hospitals, but that includes virtually any kind of business. Selecting a provider that can deliver a significant value in that regard is of paramount importance. This is another point where the managed service provider is in a position to outperform the alternative option, which should be of interest to small and medium-sized businesses (who are targeted about 40-to-50 percent of the time).

As part of the proactive maintenance that managed services are based on, managed service providers deliver a variety of solutions and security safeguards. These include:

• Spam Protection
• Content Filtering
• Email Encryption

Of course, this is just a small sample of the many security-focused preparations that an MSP like us can provide as a means of preventing various threats, like phishing and others, from successfully taking root.

Fourth, Business Continuity Simplification

Finally, it is important to consider how resilient these IT providers can help to make your business against disasters of all kinds. Whatever it is that could be impacting your business’ operations can’t be allowed to do so if it can be helped. This will require your business to prepare to preserve its continuity, which often involves preserving its data. Data backup is often closely tied to business continuity, and working with a managed service provider can make maintaining this kind of backup much easier as well.

While we’re clearly biased, the comparative value of managed services over that of break/fix services cannot be denied. However, if you still aren’t convinced, please feel free to reach out to us. We can offer your organization plenty of additional benefits and are more than happy to discuss them with you. Give us a call at (512) 343-8891 today.