Due to the high dependency on the cloud, most of the smaller and medium business owners outsource their IT service and support to the third-party service providers. Outsourcing IT service and Support team has quite a lot of advantages over hiring an in-house team. Why pay the salary and benefits to a full-time employee when you can outsource a professional team for 24/7 use for much less? Some of the reasons are mentioned below.
Cost Effective
Salaries of an in-house network administrator are as high as $100,000 in major cities of the United States. By hiring a third party, you don’t need someone full-time, yet they provide their services round-the-clock.
Small businesses don’t need to worry about compensation, health insurance, vacation time or sick leave. They need to pay the charges as per the payment period in the contract.
24/7 Availability
This is a significant advantage over hiring in-house support. The Outsourcing IT service and Support team is just a click, email or phone call away. The owners enjoy peace of mind with technology that always stays up and running.
Due to experience in working with many technologies, it is quicker for them to determine an issue regarding the IT infrastructure at your firm. Whereas with an in-house support engineer, it takes time to identify the problem and then assess a solution.
Increased Up-time
Higher uptime means the higher availability of systems to be worked upon. With remote monitoring and management by the outsourced team, they keep a keen eye on all the activities, and most of the issues are detected and repaired even before realizing there was a problem.
If the problem is not resolved remotely, the on-site support team is dispatched to find a solution quickly.
Expertise
Since the technologies in the fast-developing world are ever-evolving, training an in-house professional to keep up with the changes can be expensive for small and medium businesses.
The outsourced service providers have certified professionals with the highest level of expertise in the latest technologies. They provide periodic training to its professionals to keep them aware of changes and problems arising due to those changes. They retain the best and the brightest.
Continuity of Knowledge
When an in-house IT professional leaves, the accumulated knowledge regarding the enterprise’s network and infrastructure is gone with them. The outsourced team eliminates this problem. You get the same support even if the support staff at their site leaves.
Moreover, the outsourced teams have every IT support solutions well documented. These documents are referred in case a support engineer resigns.
Lower Operating Costs
Outsourcing a support team reduces the operational costs associated with hiring in-house employees. This also reduces the costs of buying computing resources for the in-house team as they need to maintain the infrastructure.
On the other hand, the outsourced team has direct contacts with the hardware and software suppliers which in-turn makes the buying of such resources at a lower cost.
No Management of Infrastructure
With an outsourced tech team, the business owners don’t need to take time away from the duties to search for a tech. Also, other employees won’t spend time managing the in-house tech.
There is no need for maintaining the computing infrastructure on the site. It is all taken care of by the outsourced team. The senior officials won’t spend the time recruiting and filtering the candidates. The outsourced team provides freedom to enterprises so that they can focus on their core responsibilities for staying in business.
Flexibility
An IT service provider gives flexibility to your business for scaling up the resources if you get a new project, or scaling down when the project is completed. You don’t need to pay extra to in-house employees when there’s no work for them. Also, there are no worries about hiring additional staff on an immediate basis.
With an external team, you have the flexibility to choose basic support, help-desk services and other advanced operations such as cloud solutions.
Business Continuity
The outsourced IT service provider can continually back up your IT infrastructure with remote access. By using private and hybrid clouds, an IT system is accessible from anywhere, anytime.
It ensures maximum uptime and productive staff even during a power outage or any situations that may lead to work downtime. The service provider compensates for the downtimes and crashes.
For all these reasons, small and medium businesses no longer hire technicians. No matter what option you choose, it’s essential to stay up to date on business technologies and the ultimate goal is to keep the business going efficiently. Outsourcing IT support and services is not going to fix all the IT problems overnight. But focusing on cost-efficiency and flexibility, outsourcing seems a better option.