When your business is in a growing phase, it can be difficult to scale up your IT infrastructure smoothly. You might not have fast enough servers, experience with cyber security, or the other in-house tech talent you need.
That’s where managed IT services for small businesses can help. By outsourcing to the experts, you gain the knowledge and experience you need, while offloading many of the collateral costs and the burden of training an in-house IT team.
On this page, we’ll look at the potential for managed IT to grow business rapidly, without the teething problems that are often seen when new startups try to do everything alone.
Can managed IT help grow business? Absolutely! Let’s run through some of the managed IT benefits for growing businesses, to see why this kind of support is even more crucial during times of expansion.
Managed IT solutions help get the best value from your requirements
So, how exactly does a managed IT company help grow business? It’s all about getting return on investment and supporting your company in its efforts to drive revenue growth.
This is at the heart of all our managed IT services. By providing scalable, good-value services, we help our clients to grow, which helps us to thrive too.
A good managed IT company understands that success is shared. IT services should be tailored to meet the requirements of the client, and designed to deliver maximum value on the investment made.
While there are many different managed IT solutions to choose from, ultimately the goal is the same: to keep the client’s business running and to support the client in providing high standards of service to their customers.
Professional security support to help growth goals
It’s impossible to talk about managed IT services for growing businesses without discussing cyber security.
Keeping data safe is one of the most important ways you’ll see an IT company help grow business for its clients, because data breaches are among the most catastrophic events that a new startup can experience.
Periods of rapid growth are often the times when unsuspecting businesses are exposed to the most risk, whether that’s due to human error by new employees, or scaling up IT systems without putting enough focus on network security.
It’s crucial to work with a managed IT provider who appreciates this. That’s why we put together our list of key cyber security questions to ask your IT provider, because any good IT company should be able to answer those queries for you and give you some much-needed peace of mind.
Peace of mind is a precursor to confidence, allowing you to focus on your growth goals without any nagging doubts about your data security, and giving you support when you need it most.
An expert IT partner scales with your business needs
The next big question is, can managed IT help grow business over the long term? Of course it’s good for an IT company to help smaller businesses, but you don’t want to outgrow their capabilities too quickly.
If you’re aiming for the stars, you don’t want to leave your IT partner on the launch pad. By choosing an expert IT company with proven ability to scale rapidly, you again benefit from some peace of mind that your IT provider will be able to keep up with your growth.
The ability of managed IT to grow business indefinitely can include relatively simple practical concerns like your number of Microsoft 365 user licences, or your server’s ability to handle an ever-increasing number of data transfers.
But it also includes the provider’s ability to offer you scalable support. That means being there for you 24/7 with a good understanding of the urgency in any periods of downtime, which can cost large firms millions within a matter of minutes.
Proactive managed solutions to reduce downtime
It’s important to note that there is a difference between IT support and managed IT. When you enter into a managed IT contract, you’re committing to a long-term ongoing partnership, with the IT company taking on a lot of the responsibility for looking after your systems.
Responsive IT support is different. It’s usually a much more hands-off solution, providing a response only when an incident or outage occurs.
Both are important for growing businesses, which is why you’ll often see 24/7 IT support bundled into managed IT contracts, so make sure you’re getting the level of support you need (and not just an out-of-hours voicemail number).
Downtime can happen at any time of day, and it’s sometimes more difficult to get things back up and running at night, when third parties like your telecoms provider are unavailable.
A committed IT support provider will work through the night if necessary, providing engineers with the necessary expertise to reduce downtime to an absolute minimum, and to eliminate avoidable losses from your business’s balance sheet as a result.
Avoid in-house growing pain with a professional managed solution
Finally, don’t see outsourced IT services as being at odds with building your own in-house expertise. Instead, see it as a way to level out the learning curve and fill in any gaps until you find the in-house talent you need.
It’s a common managed IT myth that outsourcing your tech support will leave you without local support from on-site engineers.
In fact, due to the 24/7 support call-outs mentioned above, outsourcing your tech support can be one of the best ways to guarantee the availability of a repair worker at short notice, even in the middle of the night.
As your organisation continues to grow, you can develop an in-house team if you want – but professional outsourced managed IT services from a reliable and scalable provider should give you all you need and more, for as long as you want.
