Does your IT department feel understaffed? Do they lack the necessary resources to get the job done consistently? Is your emergency response plan lacking? If you can answer 'Yes' to any of those questions, your team needs to expand. But, expansion means hiring and hiring means spending. If that's not a feasible solution for your business, consider outsourced tech support. Partnering with a third party IT company can be a supplement to or in place of your current IT department. Depending on your company's specific challenges, your technology team can take any number of shapes.
Here is why it's time to take a closer look at third party support:
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Outsourced tech support can literally expand your IT department. As in, your IT department will grow in number of people. How? When you partner with a third party IT company, that company becomes an extension of your team. In an instant, you have access to more people, more help, more experience, more tools, and more skills than you had previously. Many internal IT departments consist of just a few people. With restrictive budgets, there's not enough money to go around and IT is often short-changed. While that may be short-sighted (as technology is more important to a business than ever before), it's still a difficult hurdle to overcome. Hiring, training, and retaining an internal IT staff comes at a great cost that most budgets simply won't accommodate. Fortunately, by partnering with a third party company, you can pay a predictable monthly cost that fits within your budget and expand your team at the same time.
Of course, the one monthly bill (or however your specific contract is structured) will still apply. But, with outsourced tech support, the cost of supplying your IT department with the new skills necessary to keep up in the industry is passed onto that third party. You're not responsible for paying for continuing education or training for your partner's team (which becomes an extension of yours), you just gain access to a wider, more diverse skill set and reap the benefits. That's a difficult concept to argue with: it improves your bottom line and lessens your burden. Business technology moves quickly and it can be hard to predict when and how often you'll need to add skills to your IT team. By partnering with a third party, that cost becomes predictable and it's on someone else's plate. With the right partner, your IT team can grow seamlessly alongside your business.
No one is saying that having an in-house IT department is a bad thing. No one is denying that it comes at a cost. Besides employee overhead (salary, benefits, a place to sit and work, a slice of cake on birthdays), hiring and retaining employees has a few less obvious costs: paid time off, sick leave, paternity/maternity leave, and other absences. If you can't count on an employee being available year-round (and you shouldn't) and you have a single-person IT department, that poses a significant problem. Who handles your business technology needs when they're out of the building? With outsourced tech support, your IT partner is responsible for coordinating employee time off and making sure that someone is always available to answer your questions and handle any emergencies that may come up. That reliability is critical in business technology.
If you're ready to save money and expand your technology team, start exploring your third party IT partner options today.