Why Are Other Companies Outsourcing Their IT Support to an Outsourced IT Services Contractor? Is the Investment Worth the Return?
You may be among the hundreds of organizations throughout Minnesota that are currently struggling with the capability, capacity, and function of your internal and cloud IT resources. The question you are asking yourself is, “Should I make the leap to outsourced IT management services to take care of operational and cybersecurity management?”
Money is nearly always the determining factor, so let’s talk about dollars and cents.
The IT Support and Organizational Maturity Growth Curve
When you were a startup, you likely did all the IT work yourself. In those days, that meant setting up hardware, updating operating systems, and setting up email and any software that you needed. As your organization grew, you moved away from doing that stuff yourself and gave those tasks over to one of your employees. However, because your IT systems had to keep pace with the growth of your organization, it wasn’t long before your internal staff member suggested that it was time to get someone from the outside involved on an hours-plus-materials basis. Now, you find yourself with at least one internal staff member with some IT skills and paying unexpected bills when the hours-plus-materials guy has to be called in to fix some problem or set up some new device/software.
The Real Cost of an Hours-Plus-Materials IT Repair Strategy
When it comes down to money, you have to figure in your losses if your IT systems go down. How long did you have to wait the last time you had to call in your hours-plus-materials IT guy? Now, if you take the hourly salaries of the employees that couldn’t operate at full speed during the IT outage plus what you lost in productivity for that time, you’re looking at losses in a significant dollar value. Added to your losses is the bill from your hours-plus-materials IT guy. This is the real cost of your current IT maintenance and management strategy.
What’s Different About Outsourced IT Services Contractors?
Outsourced IT contractors, otherwise known as Managed IT Service Providers (MSPs), provide proactive IT maintenance within a stable monthly subscription payment model. By maintaining your IT systems with a combination of remote and on-site strategies and monitoring your IT environment for any issues that could impact your security or operations, outsourced IT services contractors help you avoid the costs associated with breakdowns and downtime. In return for the assurance of always-on IT maintenance and support, you pay a fixed monthly fee.
How Much Do Outsourced IT Contractors Charge to Keep Your IT Systems Stable, Secure, and Running Smoothly?
The fixed monthly fee charged by a Managed IT Services team is directly tied to the number of employees and computers/mobile devices within your organization. In addition to the number of workstations and employees, the cloud assets that your organization utilizes and the complexity of the required cybersecurity solution come into play.
Because every organization is different in size and the way they leverage technology, it’s impossible to put a comprehensive set of prices on a website. However, it’s fair to say that the cost of hiring an outsourced IT contractor to maintain and secure your organization’s IT environment is far lower than the cost of trying to recover from a significant data loss or a ransomware attack.
As a business leader, you already know that the old saying, “you get what you pay for” is true. You can pay an hours-plus-materials IT guy to come and fix things when they break, but you’ll have more frequent and extended downtime. The hours-plus-materials model incentivizes the IT guy to fix problems but does not incentivize him to work proactively to keep your systems running and secure. In contrast, the Managed IT Services model puts the outsourced IT contractor on the side of organizational operations because the Managed IT Services company is most profitable when they keep your systems running flawlessly and don’t have to spend extra hours fixing emergencies.
