In every industry, a debate rages. Is it better to hire in-house management/tech support teams or outsource to another company? While companies that can afford it often opt for an in-house team, the fact remains that this doesn’t work for all business owners.
In fact, the growing trend in the tech industry is towards outsourcing. Some 83% of IT leaders looked towards outsourcing their tech department in 2021.
Why is the IT industry adopting the outsourcing trend so rapidly? How can external IT support benefit your business, both financially and in terms of quality? Let’s talk about the benefits of hiring an external technology department below.
Reduced Risk of Downtime/Outages
When you have an internal IT team, the maintenance your machines receive rests at the mercy of your team. While you’d hope that they conduct all repairs and maintenance to your systems in a timely manner, you can’t rely on this.
With an outsourced IT team, the company you hire handles all the system maintenance and monitoring needs you may have. They know your business hours and can conduct maintenance and updates in accordance with them.
These external companies also offer proactive support. In-house IT services tend to wait until a problem exists, then perform reactive maintenance, costing you hours of downtime.
Higher Level of Security
We all know that a chain of security is only as strong as its weakest link. With an in-house IT team, you leave the final levels of security for your firm in the hands of employees. Employees that can get bribed, fail to perform their due diligence or get socially engineered into giving up critical access information.
The in-house security team may not have received proper training on the latest cybersecurity measures. They use the programs they know. Without the knowledge of the latest tricks hackers use, your business gets left exposed and vulnerable.
With an external tech company running the show, you don’t have to babysit your employees to ensure network security. Plus, these trained professionals stay up to date on all the latest cybersecurity trends and can update or patch your systems accordingly.
Wider Arrays of Skills to Choose From
One major struggle that appears when hiring in-house is the skills gap. You may have a series of well-trained professionals fluent in one programming language or another. Yet, they still have gaps in their understanding.
Training and education to fill in these gaps cost time and money. Finding an employee with all the skills your business requires can prove an impossible (or impossibly expensive) task. An external technology department typically has a staff full of experts in every possible IT solution available.
With this team of experts at your disposal, you can have your burning needs addressed in a timely and inexpensive manner. On that note…
Lower Initial Cost
Let’s face it: hiring, firing, and training employees is a costly endeavor. You want to pay your IT department fairly for the hours they put in.
However, that fair payment can become prohibitively expensive for businesses below a certain size. When you utilize outsourced IT services, you lower the initial cost. This lets you gain access to the kind of service that much larger companies have through an in-house team.
Increased Productivity for Your Team
Picture this: One of your employees experiences a persistent error in connecting to the network from their computer. There doesn’t seem to be an issue with the computer itself, nor the network as a whole. This employee cannot work until the issue is resolved, so they reach out to an internal IT team.
The one IT guy you have hired is on his lunch break and has fifteen other tickets to attend to before this employee’s issue can even get examined. All the while, you’re losing money because your people can’t work effectively.
Or, imagine this hypothetical IT guy of yours has over fifty tickets to handle, of varying complexity and difficulty. Some of these may prove beyond his skill level, and ultimately, they’re only one person. There is only so much an internal team can handle before it collapses under its own weight.
By outsourcing your IT department, even if only for smaller issues, you free up your employees to resolve bigger problems. The constant support offered by solutions like https://www.4bis.com/ of Cincinnati gets your main employees back to work faster.
Reduced HR Concerns
As mentioned above, hiring and firing employees is an expensive and sometimes tricky process. If you don’t operate in an at-will state, letting go of staff members that don’t fulfill their duties can cost you extra time and money. By hiring an external IT department, you eschew all of that in favor of paying for off-site service.
Ensured Compliance With Best Practices
You can compare the laws surrounding cybersecurity and personal information to a hydra. As soon as you have one system’s compliance regulations mastered, a new set of laws spring up in its place. Following this ever-shifting landscape with an internal team means extra training. That training then translates to lost revenue.
Failure to comply with these regulations, even out of ignorance, can result in hefty fines for your organization. With outsourced IT services, the team you hired on the outside remains up to date with all compliance requirements. They can then adjust your systems accordingly.
An External Tech Department Has Disaster Recovery Ready
No one wants to think about a disaster happening, but everyone wishes they had a better plan in place after it happens. Data breaches, power outages, and massive data losses can happen at any time. When you have an internal IT team, you’re at the mercy of their foresight.
Do you really want to watch someone’s face fall when you ask them about the date of the last data backup?
We thought not. That’s why an external tech department, with layered disaster recovery plans at hand, can save your company in its hour of need.
Support On-Demand
We’ve alluded to this several times before. However, it bears repeating that one of the best benefits of outsourced IT services is their ability to offer constant support. Most of these companies offer 24/7/365 support for any technical issue your team experiences, no matter the size.
Unless your company happens to be large enough to have a constant, rotating staff of IT professionals, you won’t get that with an internal team. Thus, you’re at the mercy of the IT support team’s office hours and their work burden. You can’t always get the support you need from them.
With external tech departments, you can.
External IT Support Is Scalable
Imagine, if you will, that your company leapfrogs from a small business to a large company within a few months. All entrepreneurs dream of that kind of growth until they stare down the staffing crisis it creates. If you rely on an internal tech support team to handle your issues, scaling that department with your growth takes time and money that you may not have.
Fortunately, external IT support is scalable to your needs. Shrinking your business down due to some less than stellar years? You can scale back your services without having to let valuable workers go. Growing exponentially? You can add more networking services to your existing package to buy yourself the time you need to get more people.
Many outsourced IT services even offer packages for automation to make running your business more efficient. This in itself can scale alongside your development. This can streamline internal processes, making your employees more productive.
Allows Competition Above Your Pay Grade
We alluded to this before when we spoke of cost. Hiring trained IT professionals to work within your company is expensive. Worse, they may not have the skills or hours you need to see your business grow.
This can stifle your earning potential. Especially when you have to compete with companies that have much greater technological resources than you do.
When you hire an outsourced IT team, you give yourself a fighting chance against those larger companies. You can offer your employees and clients the type of network stability they would only expect from large corporations. All this, at a fraction of the cost. This then gives you the chance to compete with them, possibly even surpass them at a local level.
Let’s Review the Benefits of Outsourced IT Services
There are many benefits to hiring an external tech team over an internal one.
First, you save money in terms of the initial investment and HR expenses. Second, you ensure security and compliance for all your networks. This then allows you to compete with much larger companies and scale your IT solutions as needed.
In short, an outsourced IT team offers the benefits of in-house staff without the hefty price tag or the risk for human error. What could be better for a growing business?
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