At least 83% of corporate IT leaders are either already outsourcing or planning to outsource their IT to professional external management services in 2021. There are more than a couple of good reasons for this. As the post-COVID economy increasingly moves towards the streamlined digitization of de-localized offices, companies worldwide are being forced to cut back on physical office costs in order to stay competitive. Managing their IT through an outsourced service is a crucial part of this cost savings process.
What’s more, the threat factors are constantly expanding against companies with limited expertise or resources to rigorously manage and protect their information technology. Data theft alone siphoned off a whopping $25.6 billion from companies worldwide in 2020 and that amount is expected to grow in 2021.
The above are key reasons why professional outsourced IT management can be a literal lifesaver for many businesses. But those are just the tip of iceberg. It’s important for any business owner to take the time to review their business structure, finances and ask themself the following questions to determine if they should move their company over to professional outsourced IT.
1. How much do you spend on IT?
It’s estimated that 45% of companies that outsource their IT do so to save money. They’re right to do this, because running IT in-house can quickly become incredibly expensive. Hiring highly capable staff that can be trusted to handle your infrastructure effectively and safely is difficult without offering high salaries for quality talent. Beyond this, the costs of dedicated internal information technology hardware can be very high if your economy of scale doesn’t match what you need to buy. Outsourced IT companies that already handle large demanding clients can remove both of these problems in one swoop at a fraction of the cost of doing so yourself.
2. Is your staff undertrained and lagging further behind?
If you can’t afford to hire dedicated, high-quality IT staff, you’ll have to train your existing employees to handle the job of IT management. This too can become expensive, time-consuming and extremely difficult to stay on top of. The IT industry has to evolve extremely rapidly simply because both technology and threat actors do the same. Handling your own staff training in such a hyper-fluid landscape while running your business at the same time could be a recipe for disaster.
To make things worse, your entire IT infrastructure might become fragmented by turnover in which former staffers are replaced by new employees that then need to retrained from scratch to continue previous tasks. In extreme cases, you might even find yourself dependent on the specific know-how of a single former staffer’s IT unique setup.
3. Does your in-house IT offer comprehensive threat protection?
Because dedicated in-house IT staffing is expensive while hardware constantly needs to evolve for new threats and data needs, it will likely become difficult stay on top of both. Sooner or later, this is almost guaranteed to make your in-house IT leaky with threat protection gaps. Given the growing worldwide landscape of data theft, ransomware, phishing attacks and other digital fraud attempts by cyber criminals, running your own IT with leaky threat protection can be extremely dangerous. A managed IT services firm already knows how to integrate strong data security.
4. Are you struggling to meet compliance requirements?
Your IT compliance needs will depend on the industry you’re working in, but in the case of many market sectors such as healthcare, government contracting or financial services, compliance requirements are strict and failing to meet them can be extremely expensive in terms of fines or even civil and criminal prosecution. With managed outsourced IT, you can avoid considerable liability issues on this front.
5. Is your business quickly growing?
While business growth is a wonderful thing and usually means higher revenues and earnings, you might not want to see those extra gains get eaten up by having to expand your in-house IT infrastructure. And you will have to expand the scope of your IT for all of the reasons already mentioned above. To avoid having your business growth also cause IT deterioration, an outsourced solution is an ideal and flexible choice.
6. Do you work in a specialized IT niche?
Just as it might affect your legal compliance needs, working in a specialized business niche can also make your IT needs particularly exotic. If your business involves specialized or highly-sensitive data storage and handling, your IT needs will almost certainly be abnormally expensive if done in-house. Hiring an external firm with dedicated infrastructure for even uniquely sensitive IT requirements can enormously reduce your costs.
7. Is your in-house IT damaging business growth and operations?
If your existing IT services start to slow down the quality of your customer relations, service delivery or business growth, it’s one extremely powerful sign that it’s time to upgrade to a more professional solution. IT absolutely should not be a reason why your business stops growing or has its reputation ruined in the eyes of customers.
Quality outsourced IT assistance offers a simple solution
Outsourced, managed IT services can solve all of the above issues and many others you possibly haven’t even noticed yet in your company. A comprehensive service like Great Lakes Computer can offer long-term IT solutions right now. These will not only deliver robustly bullet-proof data security but also let your company expand with flexibly streamlined information technology workflows backing up its entire digital structure.
