When you think about outsourcing your IT support, you probably imagine firing all of your in-house staff and giving all of your IT work to contractors who are working overseas. While this is one example of how outsourcing can work, it’s by no means the only way!
Many companies work with a combination of outsourced and in-house IT staff, or they outsource their IT services, but they have a really good working relationship with their provider, which is of great benefit to everyone.
Flexibility of scale
Being a successful business means implementing strategies that aim for growth. Sometimes these strategies pay off, and you suddenly find yourself inundated with new orders and new customers. Sometimes they don’t, and you remain exactly where you were.
This is why it’s really tricky to hire staff in the expectation of growth because you don’t want to hire people who you never end up needing. Outsourcing your IT support means that you can respond more quickly to your business’s needs. If you suddenly find that you need a lot of additional IT support, it means that you can have it almost as soon as you need it without having to first go through a recruitment process and deal with the problems that come with being understaffed throughout that process.
Check: How to Fix Error [pii_email_b47d29538f12c20da426]
SLA’s
Service Level Agreements, or SLA’s, are put in place between remote IT support services and their customers to ensure that support is provided within set timescales.
This means that you can have the assurance that if there is an IT issue, you will have a resolution within a set period of time. This is something that can become difficult to set and manage in-house because you only have a limited pool of resources, which will have their attention pulled in numerous directions. In contrast, a remote support partner will have made you their priority.
Predictable costs
Generally, when you engage with an IT support partner, you will agree to a set cost over a set time period, and you will agree on what that cost buys you.
This includes all of their hardware, holiday pay, sick leave, and all of the other costs that come along with an employee, which means that a remote IT support partner is a much more predictable cost than a full-time employee.
Less time spent on recruitment
On average, it takes 23 days to recruit a new member of staff. The time that you spent reading CV’s, interviewing, and drawing up employment contracts is all time that could be better spent on doing your day job! If you have a third party looking after your IT, they will look after the recruitment of IT staff, and you won’t have to.
Plus, have you ever tried recruiting IT professionals without any knowledge of IT? It’s pretty tricky! Having an expert third party on hand means that even if you wanted to employ some in house help, you would be able to draw on their expertise when making your decision.
Consulting and advice
IT companies have made IT their business. This means that they are not only responding to your day to day issues, but they are constantly working to anticipate new threats and new opportunities within the technology world.
This is all expertise that you can use to your advantage. Because IT companies have so many employees with so many specialties, the opportunities are so much greater than when you build an in-house IT team.
Protection from staff turnover
When you are completely reliant on in-house staff, someone handing in their notice can be crippling. You have to scramble to find a replacement somehow and get them trained up to the same level as the employee who is leaving, all within the span of a notice period. Not only is this a difficult task, but it’s also a costly one.
If you have outsourced, that headache is the responsibility of the IT company, not you.
Meet your deadline
If you have a project deadline, provided that it’s actually humanly possible to achieve, generally, a third-party provider will do everything in their power to meet that deadline for you, even if it means getting their team to work long hours. Ultimately they will do everything they can to keep your business. Plus, they will have a large pool of resources meaning that they can put in a lot of hours collectively without putting undue strain on individuals.
24/7 support
If a server goes down at three in the morning and it’s going to impact customers, you need the issue resolved as soon as possible. Now that more business is conducted online, it’s crucial that issues be resolved as soon as possible, which is the support that third party support companies offer.
If it’s in your service agreement, they will monitor systems and deal with any issues as they arise, so all you need to do is get the update from them when you come into work in the morning.
