“Show me a business without IT support,” as the ancient Chinese proverb says, “and I’ll show you a business that is about to go belly up.”
This famous saying is old because it’s true. Without the benefits of IT support, any organization that wants to do anything useful or profitable will be less than useful or profitable.
Wait, What?
It’s just science. Pretty much every business operation has IT supporting every aspect: customer service, recruitment, online and offline sales, logistics, blah blah blah, you get it. And, whether you like it or not, every business is fair game for an international band of evil hackers, thieves, and basement weirdos whose moms never loved them enough.
So, if you don’t have decent IT support, you’re:
- Putting your business at risk of lost data, reputation, and productivity.
- Preventing your business from taking advantage of a ton of benefits.
Of course, lots of businesses have their own IT team. It’s part of their strategy and business model. They’re happy to recruit their own in-house expertise that covers all the IT bases.
But, for many businesses, it makes sense to outsource IT support, just as they would any other support service such as payroll, accounts, or digital marketing.
Why You Should Probably Outsource IT Support
Let’s take a deeper, even more refreshing dive into the healing waters of good, consistent IT support. Buckle up, because we could go on forever, but luckily our copywriter will stop when the word count is done.
Good outsourced IT support does the following.
Stops Your Head Falling Off
Your cute little startup suddenly got big and popular. Well done, you. In the beginning, you could handle IT yourself. Or your buddy Greg did. Anyway, Greg’s off surfing now and you’re on your own and things have gotten out of hand. Like, Google wants to work with you but information security compliance is just a fever dream. Or, you’re hiring a ton of people in Ireland and they need a seamless onboarding experience. Bottom line: you need help. Outsourced IT support will do All The IT Things while you get on with All The Other Things.
Saves You Money
Outsourcing IT support saves you dollars because it can be far more cost-effective than hiring your own Greg/IT team. Recruitment, salary, and benefits, plus the time cost of management slaps your baby profit & loss account around much harder than the neat, flexible monthly cost of outsourced IT.
Gives You Access to Wider Expertise
With outsourced IT support, you’re not limited to the expertise of an in-house IT person. Like some geeky Marvel team (but without the lycra), your outsourced team will, between them, have the expertise and experience to cover any IT issue, from advanced systems analysis to zero-touch onboarding and everything in between.
For instance, in our own super-clever Ignition team, Jeff doesn’t know squat about IT logistics, but if you need a device management guy, he’s the bee’s patellae. (For IT logistics, you’ll need Rowen. They’re awesome.)
Improves Productivity
Decent IT support will open that shiny can of productive worms and:
Optimize Your IT Ecosystem
Any outsourced IT support team worth its cookies won’t just pick up your IT where you left off. They’ll review your IT infrastructure, measuring speed, performance, storage, latency, and a ton of other metrics. They’ll optimize what you have and make recommendations for even more improvement. That means faster, tighter, bigger, bolder processes. You’ll see the difference straight away.
Reduce Downtime
When you know that your IT systems are babysat 24 hours a day, you’ll sleep better at night, but consistent monitoring isn’t just about your beauty sleep. Monitoring protects your systems and prevents unexpected downtime or service interruption, which keeps your business online and productive, your people not-at-all frustrated, and your customers happy. One of the team has a tech problem? They’ll call our super-motivated IT helpdesk to fix it.
Improve Business Processes and Scalability
Good outsourced IT support comes with a supersized helping of different flavors of IT services that can stick a rocket up many of your business processes. For instance:
- When you’re hiring at scale, automated onboarding will get your new people happy and productive on hour one of day one.
- Mobile device management (MDM) will give you visibility of your digital fleet, and this will help you make better purchasing decisions.
- You’ll have access to cross-platform flexibility. This means you can lure top hires with our fiendish Choose Your Own Device policy, set up a disgustingly best-practice collaboration platform, and make sure that your people can do their best stuff because they’ve got the right tool for the job. Macs for your designers? Check. Windows for your sales weirdos? If you must.
Improve IT Strategy and Horizon Scanning
IT support teams can be surprisingly adept at business strategy, mainly because they’re businesses that have to survive in a super-competitive market. They also tend to be a bit geeky and know what tech might be on the horizon. This means that they’re a sounding board for your own business strategy and how IT might best support your business goals, now and in the future.
Improves Security
Getting your data and systems security sorted isn’t just about failing to become the victim of phishers and ransomware. It’s about getting and keeping your customers’ trust. It’s about proving that you’re a Grown Up Business, ready to take on bigger and ker-chingier contracts. Your sparkly outsourced IT team will get you in that position by:
24/7 Monitoring
Yes, this again. They’re your watchdogs in human form. Some of them will chase cats and pee behind the sofa, but they’ll still keep an eye on your IT ecosystem, protecting it from breach and flagging problems before they happen. Your team will enforce security patches and OS updates (but understand not to enforce a patch just when you’re about to press the “Launching Our New Product Now” button). They’ll find and flag anomalies – like why is Darryl downloading a terraton of data? Weird. And, they’ll block access to unauthorized apps and sites.
Protecting Devices and Recovering Data
Gad! Head of Sales Ashley left her iPad at the rest stop. Again. The other Ashley (CEO Ashley) is trying to log on to an insecure wifi hotspot in Dulles airport. And Ted in Accounts has disappeared, along with his personal device that’s crammed full of corporate data. Congratulations! So many opportunities for unauthorized access and national embarrassment.
Relax. Your IT support will lock, track, and locate Sales Ashley’s iPad, automatically stop CEO Ashley from doing that dumb thing she is doing, and use a file encryption key to retrieve the corporate data from Ted’s device and then wipe that data. Boom. Secure.
Offboarding Securely
When it’s time to say goodbye, you won’t need to remember to close all the accounts, de-allocate software licenses, and collect, repair, and store devices because your IT support will do that for you.
The Benefits of IT Support: The Sequel
The benefits of IT support aren’t limited to all the goodness above. IT support offers a ton of other helpful stuff: compliance support, audit and reporting, backup and disaster recovery, phishing training, laptop logistics, and more. And, what do you give in return? There are no special requirements for the care and feeding of your new outsourced IT support team except monthly deworming, paying your bill on time, and a decent cup of chai when they (we) visit.
Ignition is Silicon Valley’s best (and friendliest) IT security, compliance, and support team. Call us now–chatting about IT support and cybersecurity is our favorite thing to do!