Tip of the Week: Reduce Your Costs with Managed IT Services
Small business owners are always looking for a way to shave some of that overhead off of their budgets. While this is probably true for most business owners, the more capital a small business can save, the more it can do. Outsourcing its IT management is one way to either cut down the company’s technology maintenance costs–or, if your company doesn’t currently have a dedicated technician–can keep you from paying way too much to keep your business running smoothly.
What Do Your Costs Look Like?
Technology maintenance can get pretty expensive if you don’t have a dedicated plan for it. In fact, small businesses that don’t have an IT department, and rely on their staff to troubleshoot their own technology problems, are statistically more apt to pay much more to fix their IT than a company that takes a more proactive stand against it. Sure, you may have months where you won’t pay anything in the way of IT support, but paying a break/fix vendor every time a workstation goes haywire for no apparent reason is not cost effective in the long run.
You can remedy these problems by onboarding an IT administrator, but does that really solve your budgetary problems? The answer is no. To get the type of talent you need from your IT administrator, you are going to have to start at around $50,000 per year, not including training and benefits. If you can bring in your own IT administrator, then your business is doing well. Managed IT, on the other hand, offers a small business the opportunity to get comprehensive IT management for a fraction of the cost of what you would pay an IT administrator. And, it comes with a team of engineers, rather than one person.
How Outsourcing Your IT Is the Best Option
With managed IT services from Ashton Technology Solutions, you get a myriad of different services, including network and infrastructure monitoring and proactive maintenance, for cents on the proverbial dollar. Over time, the services you acquire as a managed IT subscriber will absolutely pay for themselves. Here’s how.
Say you have two servers and 12 workstations, some networking equipment, a couple of cloud subscriptions per workstation, and some digital surveillance for your business. With a dedicated IT administrator, you may get the expertise that’s demanded, but you won’t get the coverage; he/she is just one person, after all. On the other hand, if you settle for break/fix, you are going to be saddled with downtime every time that something goes wrong with your technology, a situation that most growing businesses can’t support. There aren’t many businesses that can support paying people to sit around and twiddle their thumbs, but surely a small business absolutely cannot.
With managed IT services from Ashton, you get:
● Remote Network and Infrastructure Support – Includes 24-hour monitoring, proactive maintenance, and remote management.
● Comprehensive IT Consulting – Provides value by helping you better understand just how helpful technology can be, while putting you in a position to acquire the technology you need.
● Help Desk – A helpline that any of your staff can call if they have computer problems.
● Backup and Disaster Recovery – Keeping your data backed up, secured, and easily recoverable, is extremely important nowadays.
● Patch Management – In an effort to keep your tools up-to-date and keep your network free from threats, we take over the responsibility of patching and updating the software you use to run your business. This is an automated process which helps to minimize your risk.
● Vendor Management – Your company uses several technology vendors, and the amount of time they command can get frustrating. Our technology professionals handle these relationships so you have one company to contact for all of your technology needs.
● Onsite Support – Our professional technicians will handle your onsite technology if we are unable to remotely fix the problems.
If you would like to talk to one of our consultants about how managed IT services can be right for you, give us a call at 216 397-4080.
