What Is the Real Value of IT for Small Business?
It’s important that your business get as much value out of your technology as possible, but this is often easier said than done. There isn’t an easy answer to how you can get the most out of your technology. Even if you implement a brand-new solution, who’s to say that you don’t actually need it or use it? Cutting costs is more important now than it has ever been, and for small businesses hoping to save on IT support, there’s no time like the present to secure your business’s future.
This all starts by making IT profitable for your organization. In other words, you don’t want to waste assets on technology solutions. Instead, you want your technology to save you money, thus making it worth investing in. To find out if your technology is a waste or a benefit to your business, try asking yourself the following questions:
- What are some of the services you have that aren’t being utilized properly? Are you wasting time and assets on software or hardware that aren’t being utilized to their full extent?
- Do you replace hardware more frequently than you need to (or not often enough)? You could be risking hardware failure or general technology deficiency by not maintaining your technology.
- How much are you spending on technology that doesn’t offer a return on investment? While it’s one thing to pay for services that make your job easier, it’s another entirely to waste them on unnecessary assets that are either a luxury or simply don’t offer enough value to justify the expenditure.
To get started, ask yourself how your business’s technology is affecting its bottom line. If you implement a new solution, what is it offering for your organization? Are the funds best being spent, or would they be better delegated elsewhere? For example, if you spend some money on automation technologies for basic tasks, you can eliminate the need for important personnel to waste time that would be better spent on more important tasks.
Another common example is the use of break-fix strategies. Businesses are throwing money away trying to keep their technology in proper working order. Break-fix model for IT support puts up the facade of value by providing support in the moment you need it most. While this does get your business back in action, you still have to pay exorbitant fees for new hardware and downtime. You’re not preventing the incident outright, which is where most of the waste comes from. Instead of wasting time, assets, and resources on downtime caused by reacting to technology troubles, try taking a preventative approach instead.
The best way to find more value in your technological investments is to work with a managed service provider like Catalyst Technology Group. Basically, you can cut out the costs of hiring multiple IT technicians by outsourcing the work to us. This eliminates the costs of managing an IT department, adding new technicians to payroll, and most important of all, the upkeep of your systems. Instead, for a single monthly payment, you can invest in an outsourced IT department that can handle any and all responsibilities of an in-house team, plus some. Here are some of the services that we can offer your organization:
- Remote monitoring and management
- Backup and disaster recovery
- Network security
- Email management
- And more!
To learn more about how IT outsourcing can help your business, reach out to Catalyst Technology Group at (317) 705-0333.
Managed IT Services Bring Substantial Value
How does your business handle IT maintenance? Chances are that your small business is in one of two situations: you either have a small internal IT department that can only accomplish a handful of tasks every month, or you have no IT department and rely on your employees to perform any maintenance. No matter how you look at it, this situation is not advantageous.
Thankfully, managed IT is something that can replace the age-old break-fix method to IT maintenance. Break-fix is the traditional model of technology maintenance in which businesses would seek out companies trained in how to resolve IT issues. Examples of such trouble could be a hardware failure, data loss, or even something as simple as an email flow problem.
Unfortunately, by the time the issue is resolved, downtime has cost your organization likely more than it did to fix the problem, hitting your business where it hurts twice. In fact, downtime is one of the major problems associated with any technology maintenance, and it’s a big enough pain point that any way an organization can reduce or eliminate downtime is important to consider. In order to optimize the use of a small business’ capital resources, downtime needs to be thwarted. A managed IT service provider accomplishes this by preventing issues through proactive maintenance.
This is something that, by nature, a break-fix IT company is incapable of fulfilling. After all, a break-fix provider profits from your technology breaking down often. Rather than just slap a temporary fix on your infrastructure, managed IT looks at the core reason why they have happened in the first place. Managed IT aims to understand and prevent issues to reduce downtime, and thus cost. When the business’ technology breaks, an MSP is actually losing money. This method ensures that when you have a managed service provider handling your IT services, it is fully committed to seeing your organization’s technology run effectively.
To this end, managed IT provides technicians who are more than capable of either helping your current IT department, or filling the gap that’s currently being manned by your employees. Doing so can open up a world of possibilities for your on-site technicians. They can finally get around to implementing new solutions designed to help your organization profit, rather than answering endless questions thrown at them on a daily basis. On the other hand, if they would prefer to play the support role, our technicians can help your organization implement new technology solutions to streamline operations.
In other words, managed IT can be whatever you want it to be–whether as a supplement to your in-house team; or as the primary service provider.
One of the main selling points of managed IT is that it’s much more affordable than break-fix IT. As previously stated, you’re not waiting for a big bill in the event of a technology issue. Instead, you’re making smaller, predictable payments once a month to keep issues from surfacing. This keeps these small issues from becoming major problems.
If you’ve had enough irritating technology troubles and want to learn more about how managed IT services can save you money and help your organization be more profitable, call the IT professionals at Catalyst Technology Group today at (317) 705-0333.