Managed IT Force Blog

Businesses of all sizes use varying degrees of technology to improve organizational productivity, efficiency, and security. The more a business depends on its data, the more crucial it is for them to manage and maintain the systems in which this data is dependent. For organizations that have a lack of financial resources to support these systems, it is often left to unqualified employees, putting your business at risk. What do you do when you need expertise that you lack and can’t afford to hire in-house staff?

There is no question that a small business can benefit from technology, as has been proven time and time again. However, an issue can arise if a business bites off more than it can chew, so to speak, and ultimately creates a spike in costs. A responsible business owner will resist this temptation and prioritize the solutions they need over the ones they want - building profitability and generating capital needed to make other improvements.

As a modern business, your success depends on your technology functioning properly. As many businesses have discovered when their solutions did not function as intended, the effects can have considerable impact to their success rates. To help keep your business running, you need to be sure that your solutions are maintained.

As more and more businesses rely on technology solutions to accomplish their everyday tasks, there is a natural expectation for there to be a bit of a learning curve as these advanced solutions are prioritized and accounted for. However, a few industry research firms have compiled their expectations for how this learning curve tendency will influence the needs and challenges businesses will face during the rest of the year.

Technology has been ingrained into today’s society to the point where businesses can’t function without it. Your organization relies on servers, networks, and workstations to keep productive and access important information, but all of this technology saddles your business with the responsibility of maintaining the components, as well as budget challenges.

In the past, break-fix IT was the way to go. Businesses would take their broken technology to a provider only when it needed to be fixed. While this used to work, it quickly became a time sink that led to decreased productivity and increased data loss. Businesses lost money through replacing mission-critical technology that could have been preserved through preventative maintenance, and the downtime that resulted, crippled their IT budgets.

Managed IT services is an option that all SMBs need to consider. Rather than taking the traditional break-fix approach to IT, where technology solutions are only fixed when they’re not working properly, managed IT solutions desire to take preventative measures to guarantee functionality and prevent major problems from happening in the first place. Managed services is an all-encompassing term that refers to solutions that can be hosted and managed by a third-party so that your organization doesn’t have to worry about them. A third-party MSP makes sure that your technology gets the attention that it needs, when it needs it.

Consider this analogy: your automobile starts to make strange sounds. You hear the sound of grinding and the engine is spitting and sputtering. You want to get it checked out, but you just don’t have the money to do so. You continue to drive it until it breaks down in earnest, and you have to purchase a new automobile. However, if you took the time to get the maintenance that the vehicle needs in order to stay functional, you might have avoided the immense cost of replacing it. You can think of a managed service provider as your own personal crew of mechanics that work on your car overnight, allowing you to drive a vehicle that’s as good as new day-in and day-out.

This is what managed IT seeks to accomplish. Through preventative maintenance, you can stave off a hardware failure for as long as possible. When a server does inevitably fail, you’ll have a fallback plan to rapidly restore data in a moment’s notice. Or, better yet, just replace the device before it falters, and keep operations moving forward without experiencing a major downtime incident. You’ll have ways to keep your business functioning smoothly even when the world is against you.

Managed IT Force can provide your business with managed services designed to optimize operations and minimize the opportunity for downtime and other wasteful IT expenditures. To learn more, reach out to us at 724-473-3950.