IT support. Much like existential anxiety and bagged salad, there’s a lot of it. What’s on offer and what’s right for your business? Let’s take a look at the types of IT support services currently clogging up the business support world.
IT Support Is More Than a Helpdesk
In the Before Times, the most common IT support model was the imaginatively-named Break/Fix model. If something IT-flavored broke, your IT support company would fix it, but not before you played a 47-hour game of ticket tennis with someone who couldn’t sound less interested in your problem if they tried. Happy times.
If you’re a business that 1) doesn’t mind waiting 2) is masochistic 3) is delighted to pay for the cost of downtime 4) doesn’t use IT ever, then this model probably worked well. For the rest of us normies, it wasn’t fun.
Now IT support is classier, and the people who provide this classy IT support call themselves Managed Service Providers (MSPs). In the MSP model of IT support, you’ll pay a predictable monthly fee for everything you need to keep your IT infrastructure wagging its tail happily. But, of course, there’s more to it than that.
We’d love to say that MSPs are usually called in by CEOs because they understand that outsourced, managed IT support is a business asset that can bring high-level value to operations and profitability (as well as being the right thing to do regarding ethics, keeping client data safe, reputation, blah blah blah). But in the real world, MSPs are called in after the Shih Tzu has hit the fan, usually in the form of a data breach, a massive outage, or ransomware with a dumb name. It’s the corporate version of not putting stoplights at a railroad crossing until a bus full of nuns has been flattened.
Don’t like the sound of that? Yeah, we don’t either.
Types of IT Support to Enjoy
MSPs often provide a tiered model of IT support that comes in all colors and sizes, so here’s a sample from the MSP selection box:
IT Clean Up
Thoughts and prayers about your data breach aren’t worth squat unless they’re backed by practical IT remediation services that close those security gaps and throw a magic fairy ring of defense around your IT ecosystem. Even if you haven’t been breached, there’s usually plenty to clean up, get control of, and fit for purpose.
Get Visibility of IT
When you know what you’ve got, it’s so much easier to fix/manage/optimize. Mobile device management is probably the most badass cookie in the IT support playbook because it’s the enabler of a quadrillion different security, management, and productivity benefits. It corrals much of your IT infrastructure into a fleet manageable from a single dashboard.
Secure Everything That Can’t Run Away
MDM allows your IT support people to really get stuck into endpoint security. You’re looking at the type of tough love that helps to reduce human error and to reinforce weak points by:
- Deploying automated device encryption. This turns data into gibberish, readable only by authorized users.
- Enforcing OS and software upgrades – no more pressing that “upgrade later” button.
- Enforcing passcodes and screen locks.
- Blocking access to unsecure wifi and dodgy websites.
- Blocking unauthorized apps.
- Applying web filtering, which stops your people from clicking before they think.
- Remotely locking lost or stolen devices and wiping the data.
Get Organized
MDM doubles as your IT asset inventory, which is far more exciting than it sounds. With help from your friendly IT support team, you’ll be able to use it to benefit every nook of your business, for instance:
- Cost planning and forecasting: you’ll keep control of licensing costs and have a more accurate idea of cost and timing of device replacement.
- Regulatory and legal compliance: an asset inventory is a requirement of most compliance frameworks and, hey, now you’ve got one! It’s also a key source of information that powers your IT asset management strategy.
- People management: hiring and firing just got easier.
Keep Things Running 24/7
Now that your IT ecosystem is secure and organized, it’s time to keep it that way. One of the joys of managed IT is that it takes care of your IT while you’re taking care of business. That’s kind of the point of it. You can expect fun stuff like:
- 24/7 monitoring across your whole IT ecosystem. Monitoring is a preventative and optimization service and might include availability monitoring, web performance monitoring, application management, and security monitoring. Something iffy? It’ll be fixed or flagged for escalation.
- Automated data backups.
- Patch management: keeping all the things updated.
Improve Business Processes
When IT is working, no one notices because nothing is broken, and that makes managed IT support sad. But managed IT support is a tool for business performance, so it has many opportunities to demonstrate how it can make your team’s work better, faster, more fun, and less annoying.
One example is automated onboarding, which will make your head of recruitment dance the happy dance. Automated onboarding gets your new hire welcomed and productive superfast – with zero-touch onboarding they’ll get access to all the apps, tools, and data they need to do their job in all of about 20 minutes. This kind of onboarding gives them a great first day and makes you look good, too. Hooray all around.
IT Strategy and Special Projects
Alongside all the daily activities that keep your business chugging along nicely, it’s easy to forget that IT support also comes with a whole bunch of expertise to call on to help with IT strategy or special projects. Things like:
- Gap remediation for compliance projects: If you’re salivating after some compliance acronyms such as SOC 2 or SEC, your IT support team will work to close up any vulnerabilities identified by your compliance assessor.
- Advising on how to align IT strategy with business strategy.
- Helping with cloud migration strategy, planning, and execution.
Yes, There Will Still Be a Helpdesk
IT support wouldn’t be very supportive without real non-bot humans available to help you if something breaks and, sadly, ticket tennis can still be a thing. Ahem, we don’t play ticket tennis. We answer the phone.
If you’re musing on the type of IT support that would work best for your business, we’d be happy to chew over the options with you in a non-gross way. Give us a call.
Ignition is Silicon Valley’s best (and friendliest) IT security, compliance, and support team. Contact us today–chatting about IT support and cybersecurity is our favorite thing to do!