IT plays a pivotal role in any business; it empowers your people to do their job, it enables processes to be streamlined, for information to smoothly flow across the business and for you to deliver exceptional service to your customers.
There comes a point (often when small businesses reach mid-size) that a single internal IT resource can no longer keep pace with the business needs. A decision has to be made whether to invest in building an IT team or to outsource IT support.
More and more companies are taking the route of utilising Managed IT Support Services, and the facts point to this being a very compelling approach.
Fact One: Failing IT has significant cost implications
Time is money, and when your IT systems are not available, then your people are not productive. On average, mid-sized businesses experience 27 hours of unplanned IT downtime per year, a full 3.4 days. Worse still are the facts that 30 minutes each week is the average time spent by employees fixing their own IT issues, and across all companies, 2.75% of productivity is lost through slow running systems. If you collect these three factors together, this is 12.4 days of lost productivity over the course of a year or the equivalent of giving every employee an additional 12.4 days of paid holiday.
Fact Two: Failing IT impacts customers
It is not just employees that suffer from IT issues; it is your customers as well. If your IT negatively affects your ability to serve your customers, then customer satisfaction will drop. Worse still, you could start to lose customers. It is estimated that when IT systems are down, the ability to generate revenue drops by 22% – and this does not take into account any penalty charges incurred through missing service levels with customers.
Fact Three: Internal IT becomes a Jack of all trades
As your company grows and the level of sophistication of your IT systems increases, you require a vast array of IT skills to manage this. Your IT team needs to be a network architect, a network administrator, a security specialist, a cloud administrator, an IT strategist, a software specialist, an IT support manager, a voice specialist, a desktop support specialist, a database administrator, application support and not to mention a CIO/CTO. It just is not possible to get all of these skills in a single small internal team.
Fact Four: Outsourcing IT Support is cost-effective
The costs of Managed IT Support Services can be as little as a fifth of the cost of an internal IT support team. For example, an organisation with between 40-70 employees based in London is likely to spend between £100k – £130k per year on IT salaries and external assistance. The cost of outsourcing this would be around £17k – £30k, a significant saving.
Put all of these facts together, and there is a compelling argument to consider outsourcing. The right Managed IT support company has the breadth of IT skills you will need; they also have the structure, processes, tools and methodology to support your IT effectively. This will result in improvements in the performance and availability of your systems and applications, and economies of scale will reduce your required operating expenditure.