Why Your West Michigan Business Needs An Outsourced IT Department
Frozen computer screens, forgotten passwords, problems connecting to the internet, cybersecurity solutions — all IT problems go away, thanks to the guiding hands of in-house IT staff.
However, sometimes it’s in a business’s best interest to outsource the entire IT department. Outsourcing is a great way for a business to maintain steady productivity and growth without spending a fortune.
Your business can tap into lots of benefits of outsourcing the IT department. However, let’s focus on only the most important reasons why you should outsource your business’ IT.
1. Free Up Internal Resources
Offloading all your IT tasks to a third party frees your business’ internal resources so that you can re-allocate them to functions that can add value and expand your business.
When IT isn’t the central focus of your product, it makes sense to outsource your IT department and channel the funds you freed into operations that directly relate to your product and service.
Setting up an in-house IT department costs a lot of business resources. You’ll need to:
- Hire specialized staff and add a few extra salaries to your payroll
- Spend on training
- Pay for management oversight
- Pay for employees’ retirement plans
- Spend on employee health insurance
- Pay your staff when on vacation, even though they won’t be servicing your IT needs
Outsourcing your IT department helps your business avoid unnecessary expenses associated with hiring IT staff. You’ll only incur a monthly IT service for the services you receive. The fee always costs less.
More importantly, IT companies pass to you the discount they receive on purchasing hardware and software in bulk.
2. Adjust Focus to Your Core Business
Every employee has limited time and specializes in a specific skill. You should let your people execute what they’re best at and prevent them from getting distracted by complex IT decisions.
After all, running a company already comes with enough challenges, and the last thing you’d wish for is the distraction of IT problems. You shouldn’t allow IT to hold your business back.
Outsourcing your IT department takes the burden off your shoulders and lets every team member focus on what matters most to your business. No one will worry about addressing hardware and software issues when they should be focusing on what they do best instead.
Outsourcing your IT department allows IT professionals to handle what they’re best at and leave you and your team what you’re best at.
3. Be More Competitive and Efficient
Technology plays a crucial role in enhancing your business’s competitive edge. However, you must ensure resources, energy, time, and money you allocate to IT are correctly spent.
Managing all IT needs in-house usually involves funding long development cycles and research before implementing the right technology. In a world of rapidly changing technology, it’s cheaper to outsource your IT department to implement up-to-date technologies in the right way.
As a result, your business can get into the market quickly and remain competitive in your industry.
What’s more, since outsourcing allows your business to focus on meaningful business strategies and critical projects, you can quickly develop a competitive edge for your business.
4. Reduce Downtime in Your Business
When you outsource to an IT company, you immediately respond to IT issues because your vendor will monitor your system 24/7/365. Prompt response reduces downtime and prevents any disruption in business operations because of IT problems.
No question, IT problems are inevitable whether you manage your IT in-house or outsource it. The huge difference is that when you outsource to an IT company, you’ll have people monitoring your IT infrastructure 24/7/365.
Even if an IT issue pops up during the holiday or off-hours, you’re certain that a professional will be keeping a keen eye on your system. The IT experts can spot issues before they turn into serious problems that might cause severe downtime.
Most small and mid-sized businesses lack the resources to keep an eye on their infrastructure all the time. However, the 24/7/365 monitoring that comes with outsourcing the IT department allows any business to monitor its network for any problem to lower downtime risks.
5. Improves Business Agility and Scalability
The greatest advantage of outsourcing your IT department is that you’ll operate on an “as-needed” basis.
For instance, during a peak season, your business might require additional helpdesk support to meet the increasing customer demand. However, you’ll want to get rid of the extra helpdesk support during the off-week season because it won’t be serving you.
In such a scenario, outsourcing your IT department will offer you two critical benefits:
- Scalability
- Agility
Scalability
Outsourcing your IT department will allow your business to quickly scale up during the peak season with already trained personnel to meet your business needs during the peak season.
When the busy season comes to an end, you can quickly scale back to the small group.
Such scalability is nearly impractical to achieve with an in-house IT department. You’d have to:
- Buy technology infrastructure to handle the increased helpdesk tasks during the peak season.
- Hire a team of helpdesk support personnel.
You can quickly eliminate the scalability obstacle when you outsource your IT department.
Agility
The best part of outsourcing your IT department is getting access to the latest technology. Technology rapidly changes every day, and it affects all industries.
The expense of shifting to the new technology can be inhibitive for many small and mid-size businesses. You’ll also experience a lag in production because you’ll need to train your employees to learn the new technology.
Outsourcing your IT department will solve the agility problem because you won’t spend capital shifting to new technology or training. Instead, you get fully-trained specialists to deliver the most current technology to your business.
Envizion IT Will Shoulder all Your IT Needs In West Michigan
No question; nearly all businesses require technology to maintain a productive work environment. On the other hand, the technology requires IT experts to manage, maintain, secure, and deploy it.
Deciding on outsourcing or managing your IT in-house can be a challenge. However, if you consider reliability, cost, and convenience — outsourcing will appeal most to your business needs.
Envizion IT can shoulder all your IT department’s tasks, enhance your business’ efficiency, and give you a competitive edge. We’ve helped hundreds of businesses in West Michigan, and we can help you, too. Contact us today to discuss how your West Michigan business will benefit from our outsourced service.
