These days, outsourcing non-core activities is simply business-as-usual: it’s just the way that things are done. Security, facilities management, catering—all these and more are routinely outsourced. IT support services, however, are rarely outsourced. But should they be?
Yet in fact, outsourced IT support makes a lot of sense. Lower costs, 24/7 proactive access to experts, help always on hand, support that’s flexible and scalable—the arguments in favour of outsourced IT support are compelling, as a growing number of businesses are discovering.
Let’s take a look.
Outsourced IT support costs
Managing an in-house IT team can be expensive. There are recruitment costs, training costs, administration costs—and of course all the usual employment ‘on costs’ such as pensions, National Insurance, and so on.
There are also the costs of flawed recruitment and retention decisions: making the wrong hire can be a costly business. And yet, in a tight employment market, employers are often under pressure to take risks and hope that people will grow into the role.
With outsourced IT support services, all of these problems disappear. Your business gets the IT support that it needs—and the costs and challenges of managing that support are in the hands of your outsourced IT support provider.
Delivering IT support might not be your core business activity. But it is the core activity of your outsourced IT support provider. Furthermore, IT support pricing models are flexible and mean you only pay for the support you need.
Expertise always on hand
IT never stands still: technologies are always evolving and improving. But that means that the skills and abilities of your IT support team also need to evolve and improve.
But in what ways? How? And at what cost? Waiting until a business-critical system has been deployed is too late to think about how to support that system with appropriate expertise. Yet investing in providing training that might not be required is costly and inefficient.
Once again, let your outsourced IT support provider handle the challenge. For them, upskilling and training IT support specialists is a core activity.
Meanwhile, your business benefits from having skilled expertise always on tap.
Access the latest technologies
The systems and technologies that your business relies on today are almost certainly very different from those of five years ago, or ten years ago. To stay ahead, innovation is essential.
But evaluating potential innovations is time-consuming, costly, inefficient, and error-prone. Is a potential innovation simply not right for your business—or was the evaluation of it flawed, or hampered by an inability to effectively use the innovation in question? Time and again, businesses decide against a particular technology or innovation, only to scramble to catch up later.
With outsourced IT support, having access to knowledgeable experts sidesteps such dangers. Already familiar with innovative technologies, they can make sure that your business’s evaluation of them is sound and effortless.
Make the right decisions about your business’s technology roadmap—and make those assessments quickly, and accurately.