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Some car owners prefer to buy an old car, give it minimal maintenance and drive it until it dies. Others only drive a late model car with a manufacturer’s warranty and follow the suggested maintenance schedule obsessively.
We all make choices like this in our daily life. As a consumer, it’s easy to take an, “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” approach to maintenance. Unfortunately, this approach doesn’t apply to the fast-paced world of technology and business continuity.
Every business wants to minimize expenses and keep tight reins on its budget. One way to cut costs is forgoing the monthly expense of Managed IT services and adopting a “break-fix” philosophy, calling on a professional only when IT problems arise.
However, the break-fix approach is not really budget-friendly in the long run. More organizations are realizing this, as the Managed IT market is projected to hit $296.38 billion globally by 2023, up from $173.4 billion. As companies grapple with the greater complexity of their IT infrastructure, the familiar break-fix way of doing things is no longer sustainable.
Are You Ready for a Meltdown?
It’s never a good time for an IT meltdown. Of course, it seems like they occur at the very worst moments. When choosing between managed and break-fix IT models, you should consider how much your company's survival depends on your IT system and how much an IT problem will cost your business in downtime.
A fundamental difference between the two models is how you are billed. Managed IT is a regular expense, but it delivers support for a fixed cost. With the break-fix model, your costs might be lower in the short run. But when something does go wrong, you'll have a surprise invoice for time and materials that can quickly get out of control.
As part of a Managed IT provider, I can tell you that our business model is built around proactive maintenance and responding quickly to resolve issues that may arise. Reactive IT services aren't motivated to solve problems immediately. The longer an issue persists, or the more problems arise, the more they can bill for service.
Active Reactiveness
A fully managed IT support program isn’t about reacting to IT issues. Managed IT provides a strategic approach towards leveraging, supporting and using IT that benefits an organization every day. Managed IT offers a framework not just for managing the IT infrastructure in place, but continually upgrading and building for the future.
The goal of a Managed IT provider is to prevent issues from appearing. When issues do arise, the goal is to provide immediate support from highly skilled resources to get the employee or your business back on track quickly. A reactive, break-fix approach can only look backwards and retrofit your existing technology whenever possible. It is backwards looking.
Ready for Action
Not only does Managed IT monitor your systems 24x7 and make efficient use of machine automation, but it provides the tools and staff you need to ensure healthy systems stay healthy and provide proactive warnings about pending failures. For most small to medium-sized organizations, purchasing software and staffing an IT department for proactive maintenance is prohibitively expensive if not impossible.
With a solid IT foundation in place, business leaders can focus on what's important to their business - growth, expansion, strategy and putting next-generation IT software and services in place.
Bottom Line: Security
Because of the cybersecurity threat landscape evolution, information security is now something businesses are being forced to embrace. In order to address the evolving threat landscape, Managed IT providers can offer a proactive strategy towards managing all aspects of your information systems, including a layered approach to cybersecurity.
Managed IT provides the types of tools, solutions and skills that most large organizations have on staff - at a fraction of the total investment needed for in-house IT talent.
For even more support, Elevity’s Managed IT provides an additional level of support in the form of strategic leadership with our Virtual CIO (vCIO) team. Like an in-house IT expert, a vCIO will determine a strategy to help companies achieve technology goals and manage risk while providing uptime assurance.
The bottom line is that paying a monthly fee for a professional to handle your IT headaches not only minimizes productivity disruptions, it can free you to focus on doing what you do best: growing your business.
If you’d like help with strategic technology planning, reach out to us here at Elevity. We’ve got the expertise, tools and technology to help provide the most robust security possible through Managed IT, Enterprise Content Management systems and a dedicated team that manages systems 24/7.
