Member Article

Outsourcing your IT support

The Top benefits of outsourcing yourBusiness IT Support

At some stage in your businesses growth, there are times when outsourcing certain tasks and functions becomes practical. For lots of companies this happens on a daily basis, from security to payroll, lots of day to date business activities are carried out by 3rd party contractors and companies dedicated to providing support in specialized areas. However, lots of business owners are unsure about outsourcing their IT departments, especially if they have managed their own IT systems for a long period of time.

We’ve been handling IT Support for companies for many years now and have decided to put together a list of the top benefits of outsourcing your IT requirements to a specialist, to give you an overview of how easy, rewarding and profitable outsourcing your IT can be.

1. Personnel costs – The overall cost of recruitment and training for IT staff can be very high. Keeping skills up to date is essential, but can be expensive for small numbers of employees. Outsourcing allows you to pass on those costs whilst ensuring the IT staff carrying out the work are all trained to the highest levels.

2. Do you need full time IT Support? - In a small to mid-size business, practical demand for IT support tends to be grouped around events such as system and software upgrades, office moves and equipment installs. Does it make sense to pay a full time employee to be around at other times, just in case?

3. Getting your money’s worth - If your core business remit is not based around IT, it can be difficult sometimes to know what to look for when hiring someone to look after it. Can you be really sure that the skill set being offered by your existing and potential employees is what you need for now and the future?

4. Potential for disaster - If you rely on your unskilled staff handling their own IT issues, they could easily do more harm than good, and will be away from their primary job while they attempt to fault-find and correct the problem, usually resulting in a call to an external IT support technician to fix the issue anyway.

5. System familiarity – Your regular staff will tend to get to know the IT systems they work with. When it comes time to replace the system, you want to be able to get the equipment that is best for your business, not have to stick with what your IT staff are comfortable with.

6. Holidays and Sickness – You may already have a great member of staff who is responsible for all your IT needs. They may be the best IT Technician on the planet, but at some stage, they will want a vacation, or they will get sick. The last thing you need is an IT Systems error, whilst your tech is on holiday. This can lead to battles for priority between departments when business critical systems fail. Outsourcing your IT support solves the issue ensuring you have 24/7 cover 265 days of the year.

7. Dedicated Knowledge - Someone needs to monitor the IT and technology marketplace. New software, hardware and ideas need to be considered. Occasionally, suppliers will withdraw support for a product or software version; such as Microsoft withdrawing support from Windows XP recently, and this needs to be included in planning. Outsourcing companies build good relationships with suppliers and can give early advice to prevent this.

Outsourcing your IT support can bring huge gains in very little time and for very little effort. Your company can overnight gain significant increases in support availability and levels of services. Outsourcing will generally bring better results for a fraction of the cost.

Please contact One IT Support Ltd if you have any questions about outsourcing your Business IT support.

0191 296 0111

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by One IT Support Ltd .