Why You Should Consider Outsourcing Your IT Support
Some of the most controversial network security breaches have been widely published in conventional media as well as on the internet. These security breaches usually resulted in third-party intruders and hackers gaining access to the private and confidential data of a business organization’s users or clients.
Network security breaches as well as rising costs of keeping their in-house Information Technology (IT) support team have led numerous businesses to consult with TCG and IT companies on their network administration options.
It’s just taking a lot of their time and resources. Here are several reasons why you should consider outsourcing your IT support.
To Focus on Your Core Competence
The first reason why you should consider outsourcing your IT support is if it’s not part of your company’s core competence or core business.
Having your own enterprise-level IT operations and support functions is like operating an industrial factory, but also opening an internet café in the same industrial facility.
It’s also similar to building and operating your own commercial mall while operating an IT company on the side within the same mall. It’s just not part of what your business needs to do. It’s not part of your core business. This has led to the rise of outsourcing IT Managed Service Providers (MSP).
Some of them even offer Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and other custom solutions. It’s like turning on the faucet whenever you need IT solutions.
Your business needs to focus on its core competence because that’s what will create value for your company and ultimately bring in revenues and profits.
If you don’t know yet what is and what’s not part of your core business, then you should go back to what you really want to do and that’s it.
To Reduce Expenditure and Manage Opportunity Costs
Outsourcing your IT support can significantly bring down your costs on maintaining an internal or in-house IT support team. Like every aspect of your business operations, each part entails expenses and costs.
Your priority for the IT expenses in your entire annual budget should be to make the most for every dollar you spend on IT resources. You should take a step back and ask yourself whether you’re getting value for every dollar you spend on your in-house IT.
If the answer is no, then it’s time to seriously consider hiring an IT MSP. Even big companies are already outsourcing non-core aspects of their business operations.
Aside from looking at the money you spend for in-house IT as a budget item expense, you also have to look at it as an opportunity cost.
Every dollar you spend on your IT is a dollar that you could’ve saved or could’ve invested elsewhere in your enterprise.
You could’ve spent it more on digital advertising or direct marketing, which would have a more direct impact on your capability to sell your products or services. But since you spent it on IT, you’re foregoing that opportunity to increase your sales revenues.
To Focus on Production and Sales
On the revenue side of things, the focus of your business operation should be on the production of sales and revenues, or billable hours if you’re in the service industry.
While having a strong IT support team is important to enhance your business operations, don’t mistake it for being the main thing. You have to keep the main thing the main thing.
And the main thing is to keep producing goods that the market will buy or services they’ll avail.
The buzz on the internet nowadays is digitalization. It’s true that digitalization is an important trend that all businesses should take seriously so they can adapt their organizations for the future.
Almost all business activities are indeed moving to the internet or are being transformed one way or another into a digital format or transaction.
But digitalization doesn’t necessarily mean every business should have an enterprise-level capacity for IT operations.
Digitalization simply means that a business should have the capacity to engage the online market and convert them into loyal customers, in the same way, it can engage the market in non-digital formats.
To Reduce Downtime, Increase Productivity
In its internal processes, one of the main goals of any business should be to increase the productivity of its workers. In a way, having a fully-loaded IT support team or department in your business can take out the productivity of some of your employees.
For one, your in-house IT team’s productivity is relatively low because they’re not doing anything most of the time other than responding to issues every now and then about employees who aren’t able to access the internet from their work stations or aren’t able to print some stuff because their computers can’t detect the printers.
Your in-house IT team is supposedly built to respond to a critical issue such as enterprise-wide lack of internet connectivity, breach of cybersecurity, or a system-wide downtime that affects your business operations.
But since this doesn’t happen often enough in a small or medium-sized business, your highly-paid IT manager and staff spend most of their time waiting for the day that they do happen – with pay.
When a critical downtime does happen, and your in-house IT isn’t skilled or familiar enough with the issue to resolve it, the result would be a negative impact on your business operations. This has an impact on the productivity of your workers who can’t work in the meantime.
To Maximize IT Services
One of the best values you can get from outsourcing your IT support is that you’ll gain so much by making the most of the capabilities of your IT MSP. Since an IT MSP’s core competence is to provide support capabilities, they have the required IT support skills, competencies, and capabilities, which you need to support your own operations.
IT is a very fast-paced discipline, and there are constant changes and updates to technology, hardware, and software that your business has to keep up with on your own if you want to maintain your in-house team.
By contrast, if you hire an IT MSP, you’ll be able to make the most of their capabilities at the price that your business can afford. For one, your IT MSP has most likely invested in hardware and infrastructure for enterprise-level IT operations.
You’ll gain this advantage when your system maintenance is hosted on their servers. Some MSPs also offer free proprietary software application download packages to their clients with a minimum number of stations serviced.
To Enhance Network Security and Resilience
Another important aspect that can be better addressed and serviced by your outsource IT MSP is network security. The digitalization trend in business and commerce has resulted in a digitalization race among companies to put up their digital shops and make the most of the emerging and expanding online market.
Along with this trend, however, is also the negative development of hackers and virus spreaders breaching networks and victimizing client users. For instance, some of the incidents which resulted in data privacy breach involved confidential healthcare information such as DNA, medical conditions, illnesses, confinements, medical reports, among others.
Other hacking incidents involved confidential financial information such as names, dates of birth, addresses, SSS numbers, bank account details, bank deposits, insurance policies, among others. A breach of this magnitude can have a lasting impact on the trustworthiness and public reputation of a business organization. Some of them never recover.
With an outsource IT MSP, you’ll gain access to infrastructure resources as well as experts who can enhance your organization’s network security and resilience. This is where the network, infrastructure, hardware, and software capabilities of your outsource IT MSP comes into play.
They have the core competence which can be deployed to provide your business with a more robust network security and resilience plan at the cost which your business can afford.
To Unburden In-House Human Resources
Part of the burden of maintaining your own in-house team is making sure that their skills, competencies, and training are up to date with the latest and most recent developments in IT. Whenever there are substantive changes, you’ll have to spend on their training on updates and upskills.
But they’re not really able to apply the full use of all these skills because they’re just waiting for a severe downtime or critical outage most of the time.
With an outsource IT MSP, you can free up your human resources from the responsibilities of keeping themselves up to date with the latest in IT. This takes off several aspects of training costs. It takes off the direct cost of training.
It also removes the productivity cost of training when your workers will have to be paid while on training instead of working on tasks that have a direct impact on your core business and revenues.
Another aspect where you can gain savings and improved efficiency is in onboarding, backup training, redundancies, and turnovers. If you have your own in-house team, you spend money and time whenever a new member has to be onboarded because the new employee will have to be trained on your systems and technology.
You also have to spend money and company time whenever someone resigns because then their tasks will have to be turned over to somebody else.
Outsource IT
There are a lot of advantages if you outsource your IT support, foremost of which is your business can focus on its core competence. Your business can adopt the latest technologies without having to spend for capital expenditures to invest in the latest hardware and software.
With outsourcing, you bring down all direct, opportunity, and productivity costs of keeping your in-house IT.