Managed IT Force Blog

It isn’t exactly a secret that small and medium-sized businesses appreciate any opportunity to reduce the amount of money they have to spend to successfully operate. One means that businesses of all sizes have used to do so has been VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) telephony. Here, we’ll explore just how VoIP solutions are friendlier to a business’ budget.

It’s the holiday season, and shoppers are flocking to stores to find the perfect gift for anyone: the gift card. However, these handy little plastic rectangles may not be so perfect after all. This year, they’ve been a key component to a business email compromise scam that has been popular in the past few months.

No matter how you look at it, technology is expensive. You’ll rarely look at your IT invoices without cringing a little on the inside. However, it’s important that you take a glance at these every once in a while to understand just what you’re getting from your technology budget. Ultimately, you want to ensure that your IT purchases are yielding a positive return on investment, and therefore, providing value for your organization.

There are a few sounds that are familiar to any office: keys clacking away, coffee being sipped (or slurped), and the rattling, squawking hum of the printer. Yet this image presents a crucial question: do you know how much your printer is costing your business each time it is used? In today’s blog, we’ll review how you can calculate this investment.

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.