An effective, up-to-date IT infrastructure sits at the heart of every thriving modern day business. It is imperative in ensuring collaboration and information sharing; enabling all areas of the business to be managed appropriately. As a vital business process enabler, IT resources need to be managed, monitored and maintained properly. How can outsourcing your IT management to a managed service provider (MSP) benefit your organisation? Here are just some of the ways:
Freeing up your IT resource and increasing staff productivity
SME’s are under immense pressure to extract as much value as possible from their IT resources. With a matrix of business functions reliant on your IT infrastructure including email, help-desk, back-up and security, remote management of these functions can free up your IT employees to focus on other areas of the business in a more strategic and value-added fashion.
Potential savings outweigh initial costs
Managed services can take the pressure of existing staff and can save you from having to hire additional staff to cope with increased pressures. An MSP will have their own expert staff to monitor and manage your IT resources and infrastructure – relieving you of the need to have on-hand expertise. Giving return on investment as well as added value. At least two-thirds of all IT spending is just to sustain the business, not to change or transform the business. Gartner highlights, “The investments allocated to do new things, to change the business, are usually low, no more than 20 percent, and the investment in innovations which could transform the business is even less.”
By delegating to an MSP you can save time and increase control of difficult to manage processes to focus more on other areas of the business and facilitate growth. In the hands of an MSP, IT management is proactive rather than reactive.
Migrating risk
Through managed service providers like Prodware, companies can benefit from predictable and reliable resource management. Via a service level agreement (SLA), companies can assure themselves in an event of a crisis that their MSP is responsible for resolving problems and getting things up and running again in a timely manner, often to specific agreed KPI levels.
These SLAs give organisations peace of mind that an issue can be resolved quickly or even prevented, with pro-active monitoring and by ensuring your system is always up-to-date. The customer is also not at risk of skill shortages, lack of awareness or unpredicted costs.
Up-to-date resources and secure IT management
While the average person is becoming increasingly well versed in the use of basic technology, there remains a need for experts in the industry to ensure your business can stay up and running on a daily basis as well as in the event of an emergency or line failure.
With greater knowledge of potential risks, when conducting an audit of the systems you have in place MSP’s can highlight potential gaps in your IT network, and help develop a robust and secure infrastructure.
Prodware provides specialist advice on both application and infrastructure maintenance, are up-to-date with technological advances and are able to provide the latest solutions via partnerships with leading IT vendors to their customers.
As well as all the advantages already mentioned, managed services such as application support and maintenance services can be tailored to your business needs and can grow as your business develops. Many times, the efficiency gains through managed services are so great that businesses are surprised by the extent of the inefficiency of their prior system, so costs can be much less than many SMB’s initially perceive. In addition to application support, Prodware also offers cross-platform support on networks, servers, peripherals and communications hardware from multiple vendors. Contact Prodware today to find out how we can help alleviate IT pressures through our managed services offering and to arrange an initial systems audit.
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