If you’ve ever considered outsourcing your company’s IT, some of these doubts might sound familiar:
- It’s too expensive. We can’t afford to outsource.
- We can manage with our in-house talent. No one knows our systems better than we do.
- We already have in-house IT people. What would happen to their jobs?
- Can we trust a Managed Service Provider (MSP) to look out for our best interests?
- Is their security strong? What if we’re opening ourselves up to more security risks?
- Will they always be available when we need them? What if we go down on a weekend or holiday?
In reality, partnering with an IT provider can save you money, enhance your existing IT team, and take the pressure of IT management away so you can focus on driving the business.
Did you know that 37% of businesses already outsource their IT? And with cybersecurity becoming increasingly complex, more organizations are turning to MSPs for help. A recent survey found that 77% of SMBs anticipate at least half of their cybersecurity needs will be outsourced in five years.
But there are plenty of other advantages to outsourcing your IT. Download our free infographic to explore 5 key reasons why more and more businesses are partnering with MSPs.
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Why Veridian Homes Outsourced Their IT
Still not sure if outsourcing your IT is the right decision for your business? It can help to talk to colleagues who have already taken the plunge.
Recently, I sat down with April Dichraff (VP of Human Resources, Administration, and IT at Veridian Homes) to discuss why Veridian Homes decided to partner with Elevity for their IT needs. Here’s an excerpt from our conversation.
Paul Hager: Let’s talk about when IT came to the forefront for you at Veridian. How did Elevity help there?
April Dichraff: I was in the IT role for 3 weeks when we had a security issue pop up. We called in Elevity to assist us. Thankfully we got out of it quickly. With Elevity’s help, we were able to salvage what we could and move forward.
During that time, I made some business decisions for our IT team. We went from having a department of two individuals down to one. Probably two months after that, we went to an IT department of none. We partnered with Elevity for managed services.
PH: For a lot of businesses, their primary business isn’t IT. You build homes. Your primary job is not supposed to be IT. Did you talk to people about outsourcing IT? You even posted a job and were interviewing for a Director of IT position – someone who could both fix stuff and be really strategic at the same time. How was that?
AD: We had been searching for over a year for an IT director. We interviewed a lot of great people but didn’t find the right person. It was towards the end of this process that I took over the role of VP of IT. I determined that we needed to go in a different direction with IT that we had never gone. I started thinking about outsourcing the entire department. In doing so, I did reach out to other companies as well as friends in IT.
I had some really great feedback from my IT friends. Several of them thought I was crazy to outsource my entire IT department to a company that wasn’t a part of our culture. I had to remind them that if I continued to go in the same direction that our company has been going in for years, to me that’s the definition of insanity. I didn’t think we were going to make true strategic headway going in that old direction.
I also had to be honest with myself. I know where my strengths lie. I don’t have an educational background in IT. To really have strategic focus and promise for our company – and to deliver on the things that I thought were going to be important in the long-run – I needed a partner that could help us do all that. So that’s why I went the direction I did with Elevity.
PH: Do you think part of what helped was knowing that Elevity had tech people at every level? You and I are able to focus on strategic stuff. But then Elevity has team members that keep the trains running. We have team members that drive home the server upgrades. And we have folks that answer the phone and deliver really important customer service to users. It’s really hard to find that in one body.
AD: You can’t find that in one person. The other piece of it was that we needed so many different talents. I added up the salaries for all the education and experience we were going to need. My budget was going to be out of control – and that was before all of our equipment and hardware needs I knew were coming down the pipeline.
I could also see further on down the road that I might not have enough work for this person with this certain skillset to keep them busy, keep them challenged. Was I still going to have to hire that higher-level IT person to manage this group knowing that I don’t have the exact IT background to drive a lot of that? For the success of this organization, I wanted to ensure that we really thought through a smart deliverable that our owners could look to and say, “This is a great strategic direction.”
