In the UK, around 34% of businesses entrust their IT support to an external supplier, making IT the most commonly outsourced business function. For many organisations, particularly SMEs, IT support outsourcing provides a cost-effective way to access a broad range of technical skills, and truly exploit technology for strategic business gain. By partnering with a managed service provider, your business can benefit from secure, high-performance and strategically aligned IT, without the cost and time pressures that can come with managing an internal IT function.
Solution Consultants – Managed IT, Cyber Security and Solutions for Reading Businesses
Here at Solution Consultants, we help organisations across Reading and Berkshire work more productively and securely, by leveraging the power of expertly managed IT and tailored solutions. We offer a full suite of IT services, designed to free Reading businesses from the challenges and expenses of managing their own IT teams, allowing them to focus on what really matters.
As businesses grow, the complexity and scale of their IT systems usually expand in parallel. At some point, the management of IT infrastructure starts to place an intolerable burden on staff, which causes many business owners to ask the question:
“Should IT outsource my IT needs, or build an internal IT department?”
In our view, IT outsourcing offers a compelling value proposition for SMEs, and represents the commercially and operationally shrewd choice for businesses that are heavily reliant on their digital infrastructure. To explain why, here are 6 reasons IT outsourcing makes good business sense.
Affordable Access to a Multiple Services and a Broad Skills Base
IT outsourcing gives you access to multiple, dedicated support functions and a broad range of skills and knowledge, without the costs and recruitment challenges that would come with assembling such capabilities internally.
The support you’ll benefit from will typically be delineated into 2 key functions.
Your day-to-day IT needs will be managed and supported by what you might call your ‘first response team.’ This will comprise a small task force responsible for monitoring and supporting your technology, and will likely include an account manager, technicians and helpdesk personnel.
Beyond this, you’ll also be able to access highly specialised guidance, and strategic consultancy that helps you harness technology to overcome your most intractable business challenges. IT companies aim to hire a broad and diverse skillset, so they’re able to manage, support and offer project leadership across a wide variety of IT environments and disciplines, including networking, compliance, cyber security, cloud solutions and more. By outsourcing your IT needs to an external supplier, you get access to these technical skills ‘on tap,’ without the salary expenses, training and personal development costs that assembling such a large, multi-skilled team internally would entail.
Service Level Agreements (SLAs)
Entrusting the management of your IT to an external party can feel like a leap into the unknown at first. Perhaps you fear that they won’t manage your technology with due care or attention, resulting in outages that impact your productivity, and how can you be sure that their helpdesk support will be attentive and responsive?
Fortunately, most IT providers offer written service level agreements (SLAs), which underscore the service levels and performance outcomes prospective clients can expect before they commit. An SLA will often commit to meeting pre-defined performance targets, particularly in relation to response times and uptime. It may even contain provisions for compensation should the provider fail to satisfy certain performance commitments.
Additionally, the SLA will set out the division of responsibilities as they apply to both parties, ensuring that both the provider and your business, are able to work cooperatively and constructively to deliver the best possible outcomes. Further contractual details will also be contained within the SLA, including the contract’s length and termination conditions.
By defining the service quality and performance standards you can expect, SLAs remove uncertainty, allay doubts, and provide assurances that the support arrangement will deliver the desired outcomes for your business.
Valuable Insights and a Fresh Take on Your IT
Over time, it’s natural to become accustomed to quirks and inefficiencies within our businesses. Without the benefit of context, these issues start to fade into the background and get overlooked, and biases can come into play, making it harder to be objective about problems and take the necessary action to solve them.
An IT support provider can offer an unbiased, external assessment of your IT infrastructure, examining how well it supports your business processes and aligns with your goals. Their objective perspective will draw attention to issues that you’ve become oblivious to, enabling them to propose changes that deliver a tangible positive impact for your business. Through insights informed by real-world experience, they’ll be able to suggest cost savings, devise ways to implement effective efficiency improvements, and achieve better alignment between your IT and your business’s strategic objectives.
Additionally, they’ll be able to assess how well your IT compares to best practices in your industry, through experience working with similar businesses. These insights will help you keep pace with leaders in your industry, ensuring you maintain a competitive edge in today’s digitised business landscape.
Predictable IT Budgeting
IT outsourcing allows you to anticipate IT spending reliably on a month-to-month basis, supporting predictable budgeting. By opting for a fixed-fee managed service contract, you’ll benefit from a pre-agreed package of services delivered for a fixed monthly fee. These packages usually aim to be all-inclusive, containing all the vital service elements, and relatively few billable elements. This ensures transparent, manageable billing that eliminates the stress from IT spend management.
Additionally, an IT service provider can help you factor future projects into your long-term spending forecasts, by providing a costed blueprint for changes well ahead of project delivery. This ensures you’re able to plan for future expenditure, and spread the costs as necessary to alleviate budget pressures.
Cyber Security and Compliance
Cyber security threats are evolving at an alarming rate, with threat actors developing new capabilities, and exploiting new threat pathways to steal and corrupt corporate data. Coupled with a demanding data compliance landscape, today’s businesses face substantial challenges when it comes to implementing robust data security protections that meet the legally mandated standards.
By outsourcing your IT to a security-conscious managed service provider, you’ll benefit from access to advanced security tools designed to offer the multi-layered protection advocated by leading regulatory frameworks and standards. A managed service provider will seek to understand your compliance obligations, conduct a security audit to assess current vulnerabilities in your IT system, and suggest changes and safeguards that could be introduced to enhance your security posture. From real-time threat detection and response, to identity and access management controls, an outsourced IT provider will be able to advise on, and deploy, the security devices you need to keep your data secure and compliant.
Disaster Recovery Services
Maintaining resilience in business means having a robust plan of action for overcoming any setback or crisis. Cyber incidents, data breaches, fires, floods, and theft, are just some of the challenges that can disrupt and potentially devastate businesses that don’t have an effective business continuity and disaster recovery plan in place.
An IT provider can help you fortify your business against disruption by working with you to develop a business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) strategy. At its centre, this strategy will feature a comprehensive data backup system, which the provider will configure, monitor and test regularly on your behalf to ensure its readiness in times of crisis.
An outsourced IT provider can advise and guide your business on BCDR best practice, ensuring that resources are spent wisely to establish backups and failover systems which protect your most critical systems and data stores against unforeseen challenges.
In Summary
While we acknowledge that IT support outsourcing can seem daunting at first, the practice offers numerous strategic benefits to SMEs. By partnering with a managed service provider, you’ll free yourself from IT management and maintenance tasks, benefit from strategic insights informed by deep expertise and experience, and better align your IT with your business goals and commercial objectives.
Solution Consultants – Managed IT that Supports the Success of reading Businesses
Based in Reading, Solution Consultants provides IT Support, Telecoms, and Cloud solutions for SMEs across Berkshire and the Thames Valley. We get to know your business, its challenges and goals, and deploy scalable and agile technology solutions that make a real difference.
We specialise in simplifying IT, making valuable technology more accessible than ever before. We believe technology has the power to transform your business and open access to new markets. Need a hand with a tech challenge, or getting the best from your tech more broadly? Get in touch with us today. We’ll be glad to meet with you, listen, and provide actionable insights and guidance that move you forward.