In Florida’s modern business environment, you need several gadgets, including computers and smartphones, in your IT system to accomplish most tasks. That’s why having effective and efficient IT systems is key to keeping your employees productive and your clients happy.
As your company grows, so do your IT requirements — and managing them can quickly become overwhelming. This begs the question: Should you hire a managed IT services provider (MSP) or internal IT staff? The short answer is that you're better off outsourcing IT to MSPs because they're much better at specialized IT tasks — and they even take regular ones to the next level.
Here are but some of the things that MSPs do every day that in-house IT can never keep up with.
1. 24/7 Technical support
Did you forget your password and get locked out of your account? Is your internet connection or PC extremely slow? Are you faced with the dreaded blue screen of death? These are just some of the common technical issues that businesses encounter.
Internal IT employees will typically respond to these concerns within office hours. So if you request tech support on a Friday night, for instance, the earliest time you can expect them to respond is on Monday. If you need a more immediate response, you’d have to pay them for overtime work.
But with an MSP, you can expect 24/7 technical support with fast response times. This reduces IT downtime and related expenses and boosts productivity. Not only that, but a reputable MSP can handle any type of IT problem. That’s because they have a team of IT specialists — each equipped with impressive experience and up-to-date training and certifications. This allows MSPs to handle even the most complex IT infrastructures.
We at Integrated Computer Services (ICS) answer 85% of support calls within a minute or less. We also offer competitive service level agreements, so you can expect speedy resolution times for all of your IT concerns. In fact, our Level II and III admins are Microsoft-certified professionals who have extensive experience in troubleshooting Dell, HP, IBM, Lenovo, and other top hardware brands.
To enjoy the same comprehensive support with in-house staff, you’ll need to employ multiple experts since you can’t expect a single employee to be proficient in all aspects of IT. But doing so would be very expensive.
Aside from salaries, you’ll also have to spend for benefits, vacation and sick leaves, and training (to keep your IT team up to speed on the rapidly changing technological landscape). In contrast, MSP pricing is much simpler: a flat monthly fee for unlimited IT support.
2. Proactive IT system maintenance and management
Given the sheer volume of support tickets they get per day, internal IT employees typically spend the majority of their time putting out fires. But if you partner with an MSP, you’ll benefit from proactive maintenance and management of your IT systems, which ensures that everything is always working optimally. This also prevents problems from arising in the first place.
At ICS, you can expect the following:
- 24/7 remote monitoring of servers, workstations, tablets, laptops, and other hardware
- Weekly/Biweekly scheduled server maintenance
- Weekly/Biweekly health reporting
- Regular Microsoft updates and patch management
- Automatic problem escalation and resolution
What’s more, when you work with us, you’re sure that you’re backed up by a provider with multiple certifications and affiliations:
3. Cybersecurity management
Given the growing sophistication of today’s cyberthreats, organizations of all sizes need to be protected using robust cybersecurity technologies. But the steep price points of such tools make these inaccessible to the IT staff of small- and medium-sized businesses.
The good news is that MSPs use these advanced technologies to continuously monitor, assess, and secure their clients’ systems. They also stay updated on the latest network protocols, hardware configurations, and IT solutions to ensure that they always adopt IT best practices.
When you sign up for ICS’s managed IT services, you’ll enjoy security services such as:
- Managed threat detection and remediation with active threat hunting
- Firewall management and monitoring
- Scheduled network security auditing and IT vulnerability scans and assessments
- Advanced threat protection, anti-spam management, and link checking for email threats
- Endpoint security software management
- Cloud web security and protection
- Security awareness training
4. Backup and disaster recovery (BDR)
With in-house IT staff preoccupied with support tickets, they are likely to deprioritize BDR efforts. In fact, 68% of small businesses don’t have a written BDR plan. This means that if you experience natural disasters or hardware or software failures, you run the risk of suffering costly IT downtime and catastrophic data loss.
A 2014 Gartner study estimates that the average cost of downtime is $5,600 per minute. Ninety-eight percent of organizations also say that just an hour of downtime costs over $100,000. In the 2016 Ponemon Institute report, the average cost of downtime is reported to be $8,851 per minute.
Unfortunately, outages rarely last for just a minute, so the average outage cost amounts to nearly three-quarters of a million dollars. This number is almost a 50% increase from 2010’s average outage cost of almost half a million dollars. Just imagine the skyrocketing increase when you translate those figures to today.
Additionally, 93% of businesses that experience data loss for more than 10 days have filed for bankruptcy within one year. Among small businesses, 60% close down within six months of losing their data.
You can prevent such disastrous outcomes by turning to a reliable MSP like ICS for your BDR needs. We offer secure cloud backup solutions and use real-time replication to an on-site BDR device to guarantee that your IT systems, servers, and mission-critical applications will be available at all times.
Interested to learn more about ICS’s managed IT services for your Florida business? Try it out for FREE for 30 days!
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