Main Points
- Outsourcing IT support frees up your resources. Providing in-house support to your staff and users can be expensive from a man-hours perspective. You would most likely need to set up and maintain a dedicated helpdesk that is operated by key staff and will be a significant cost to your business in terms of management overheads. Even if you are a smaller operation with small IT systems, somebody in your business (this could even be you!), will need to be available to provide IT support for a workforce that is increasingly mobile. Greater economies of scale allow an outsourced IT partner to provide a helpdesk at a greatly reduced cost.
- Savings on staff costs. Skilled people with strong credentials don’t tend to come cheap, there are also recruitment and hiring costs to be taken into consideration when employing a new member of staff. Staff also come and go – why spend time and money training an employee to support your business’ IT systems, only to see them leaving for another employer and taking their expensively acquired skills with them? By outsourcing your IT support requirements, you can free up any in-house staff to concentrate on work that can add value to your business rather than spending precious time fire-fighting IT issues.
- Having piece of mind. Complex issues such as backups, disaster recovery and security can be very stressful things to manage and are the kind of things as a business owner or director that could perhaps keep you awake at night. Having a partner who you outsource your IT requirements to allows you to pass that stress onto people who have the skills, knowledge and infrastructure to deal with them. By outsourcing you are prioritising these issues rather than allowing them to become distractions that need constant attention from yourself and or in-house IT staff.
- Saving money all round. When you find the right IT services partner, they will work with you and use their experience and expertise to identify any points and aspects of your business which make sense for you to outsource. This will save your business money in the long-term by allowing you to structure budgets accordingly for your IT needs and allow you to divert funds as appropriate to other projects and requirements.