What Are Outsourced IT Support Services?

Cyber Command on December 1, 2021

Almost every business uses technology to compete in our increasingly-connected world. Although technology opens up new possibilities and increases productivity, anybody who has used it knows that unexpected problems often arise. That’s when the support provided by in-house or outsourced IT support services can be absolutely vital to your business’ successful operation.

As you develop a plan to tackle your business’ own IT needs, you may be wondering about the difference between in-house and outsourced IT services. Our guide will provide you with more information about outsourced services and the advantages they offer so that you can make the right decision.

What Are Outsourced IT Support Services?

Methods to Meet Your Business’ Technology Demands

By and large, handling your business IT needs involves using one of two different methods. You may decide to staff your own IT team to handle any technical issues that arise with your business’ own resources. This allows you to have full control over the IT solutions that your business receives, but also adds to the demands that your business faces by adding a whole additional team to the resources you need to maintain.

An alternative solution is provided by third-party companies that offer outsourced IT support services. These third-party companies can provide your business with high-quality, 24/7 support that uses the latest tools of the industry to get you the solutions that you need. This is often seen as a more efficient way of meeting your business’ IT needs, since you won’t have to devote energy and resources towards managing your own IT department.

Disadvantages of In-House Support

Traditionally, businesses have relied on their own IT support teams to handle all of the issues related to technology. However, this can come with a number of downsides. Perhaps most obvious from a business perspective, one disadvantage is that you will have to account for IT needs in your business’ budget. Training, wages, and equipment for your IT staff add a number of expenses to your spending.

There are some other disadvantages to handling your own IT support in-house that may not be as readily apparent. For example, you might not have the support you need when you need it if your business doesn’t have the resources to maintain 24/7 IT support. You’ll also need to focus on ensuring that your IT department is using the latest technology and practices, diverting the attention you could be focusing on your business itself.

Solutions that Managed Services Provide

As you can see, managing your own IT support involves a lot of work. That provides an extra burden on top of everything you already need to do in the day-to-day operation of your business. Here are some of the ways that outsourced IT support can benefit your business.

Scalable Resources

The demands placed on your business often fluctuate over time. Depending on the exact nature of your industry, this can be for a variety of reasons. For example, some businesses rely on the increased demand of a busy holiday period, while others may see an increase in business during certain seasons. As the demands placed on your business change, your needs for IT support will also increase or decrease accordingly.

Having managed or co-managed IT services on your side helps give your business the flexibility it needs to change to match these shifting demands. You won’t have to worry about being understaffed to tackle issues or being overstaffed without enough work to justify paying the number of professionals you have on the team. Outsourced, managed services provide exactly the right number of technicians to match your business’s current needs so that you’re never wasting resources.

Increased Productivity

Along with eliminating waste, you might otherwise have from your IT department managed services also help the rest of your team to perform productively. Technology impacts just about every aspect of the way that you handle business. That means when there’s an issue, it prevents members of your team from doing what they do best. This loss of productivity can have a big impact on your bottom line, damaging you financially.

Having technology solutions on hand when you need them is vital in today’s fast-paced business environment. Using managed support services ensures that you’ll always have professional help on hand to promptly address any technology concerns you or your staff may have. That speeds up the process of getting things back to normal working order, allowing your team to focus on doing their job instead of having to try to troubleshoot their technology.

More Cost-Effective

Any business owner’s first concern is the financial well-being of their business. You may think that you’re saving money by not hiring an outside firm to handle your IT needs. After all, one less item on your list of expenses is good for your bottom line, right? While this seems intuitive enough, the truth is that you’re most likely able to use your financial resources more effectively if you use managed IT support instead of relying on your in-house team.

When you use managed IT services, you’ll pay one predictable flat rate for your IT solutions. Compare this to the unpredictable and ever-changing expenses associated with managing your own IT department, where you’ll have to cover training, replacing, and maintaining the best resources for your professionals. The predictable expense of having a third-party IT support team on your side is another advantage for your business.

Better Customer Experience

In our fast-paced business world, customers expect an experience that is convenient and easily accessible. Even a momentary lapse in the services that you provide can create a frustrating situation for your customers. This may lead them to seeking out a competitor for their needs instead, hurting your business’ ability to turn a profit and grow your customer base.

Avoid these negative customer experiences by having cohesive IT solutions on call when you need them. That helps you to avoid any lengthy outages or downtime for the service or product you provide. Customers will get a predictable, comfortable experience without any unexpected obstacles getting in their way of getting the best possible experience that your company can provide.

Increased Level of Security

These days, it seems like barely a week goes by without some high-profile cyberattack making headlines around the world. Ransomware and other types of malware attacks cost businesses in every sector of the economy millions of dollars every year. If you aren’t using the latest cybersecurity tools and practices, your business may be at risk.

Protect your business’ critical data by hiring an IT firm that will put in place the highest degree of protection possible. They’ll work with the rest of your organization to educate and inform people of the safest practices when using technology. They’ll also have access to the most powerful anti-malware tools available to keep your business protected, giving your customers the assurance that any personal information they trust you with is kept secure.

Support at All Hours

There’s no telling when an issue with your technology may arise. While problems may crop up more frequently during busy times when the demands placed on your business are at their highest, they may also occur in the middle of the night when your business is running at minimal staffing. Maintaining your own IT team that can be on hand every day at all hours is an expense that many businesses cannot afford.

Fortunately, outsourced IT support services provide a more cost-effective way of meeting your business’ IT demands whenever they may arise. Find a third-party firm that can offer 24/7 support 365 days out of the year. That sort of reliable sort will increase the peace of mind you feel as a business owner, knowing that solutions are always within reach when you need them most so that your business experiences minimal downtime.

Expertise at Your Command

Technology is a field that is constantly changing as new innovations push the boundaries on what is possible to achieve. Staying up-to-date and keeping your business on the cutting edge of all of these new innovations can seem like a daunting prospect. Add that to the already demanding workload of keeping your business at the forefront of your specific field and the task can seem nearly impossible.

Give yourself one less thing to worry about as a business owner by hiring a professional IT firm to handle your tech needs. With a trustworthy team on your side, you’ll have access to the latest tools and technology that your business needs to run effectively. They’ll stay on top of what’s new in the IT world so that you can focus on what your business specializes in instead.

Wondering if outsourced IT solutions are right for your business? A technology strategy session with a member of our team of IT experts can give you more insight into the advantages working with our companies provide. We’ll show you all the ways that we can transform IT support from being an annoying expense into an asset that helps your company thrive.

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What Is Included in Managed IT Services?

Cyber Command on November 1, 2021

Information technology (IT) is dynamic and constantly evolving. This means that to stay competitive, businesses not only need to maintain their infrastructure, but also need to keep abreast of new developments that are constantly giving people more powerful, flexible, and streamlined ways to work and collaborate. Enter managed IT.

Staying current can be daunting even for businesses able to devote the resources to a dedicated in-house IT department. Fortunately, these same technological advancements have made it easier than ever before to take advantage of a managed IT solution. At Cyber Command, we have the expertise and versatility to work with you to put in place just the right solutions for your business.

What Is Included in Managed IT Services?

Given a long enough timeline, something is going to go disastrously wrong. It could be a single truly exceptional event like a fire. It could also be an unfortunate confluence of circumstances, like a simple user error affecting just the wrong set of shared files at exactly the worst moment. Either way, you have clients waiting and your business has ground to a halt.

By the time a disaster strikes, you’ve already made the most important decisions that will determine how quickly your business is up and running again. Minimizing your downtime is about realistic assessment and preparedness.

A Specific Assessment

Even within the same industry, two companies will operate a bit differently. We work with each client to assemble a risk assessment specific to them. In particular, we look at which areas of their infrastructure are most vulnerable, and which ones are critical to continuous operation.

A Ready Plan of Action

Guided by a thorough assessment, we lay the groundwork ahead of time to minimize your downtime when the unexpected strikes. Typically, this means mitigating risk using strategies like regular server backups and off-site data storage, as well as having fail-over systems ready where it’s practical.

Cloud Services

A great deal of IT infrastructure is stuff that you want to use, but don’t really want to have. A properly-implemented cloud-based infrastructure offers a number of productivity advantages while simultaneously lowering your exposure to risk.

Where the Cloud Boosts Productivity

A cloud-based infrastructure by its nature makes it simpler to keep your staff on the same unified system and to quickly apply updates or refinements to that system for the entire team at once. The cloud also lends itself very nicely to collaboration and data-sharing.

Where the Cloud Mitigates Risk

The larger cloud-based software suites all have very active cybersecurity teams working to keep them protected, and you benefit both from the scale of the operation and the efficiency with which the systems can be updated. Also, when you host your cloud services with Cyber Command’s expert staff, you remove some of the risk that’s inherent in storing everything locally.

Co-Managed IT

Information technology is now a part of every business to a greater or lesser degree. Our goal at Cyber Command is to work with your internal IT staff. Whether you have a dedicated IT department or just a technologically-inclined staff member, we want them to be able to focus on big-picture strategies that will push your business forward instead of needing to react to glitches or to maintenance demands. We want to free them to focus on growth.

While your team is proactive, ours is also on standby. We strive to minimize problems, but when a support issue does come up our team has the scale and experience to resolve it promptly. Because we have a large staff that has worked with IT systems for years, we’re in a position to field a broader range of skills, and maintain a higher level of availability, than it’s reasonable to expect from a department with just a few individuals.

Company

At Cyber Command we have been helping our clients succeed since 2015 by delivering expert maintenance, IT services, and consulting. Our clients’ success is ours as well, and we’re constantly looking for new ways to maximize their productivity.

We Work With You

Because we succeed when you do, we strive to be a seamless extension of your own business. That means learning how you operate so that we can be of the most use to you. It also means consulting with you to find just the right solutions that are tailored to your business, and answering any questions you have in straightforward language, without obscure tech jargon.

Our Monthly Rate Is All-Inclusive

Our all-inclusive support plan means that you always understand what your IT costs will be, and you won’t be blind-sided with a large bill if there’s a rough month.

Since our price doesn’t fluctuate with the number of issues we need to troubleshoot, we’re highly motivated to be proactive in our approach and to keep your IT problems as minor and as infrequent as possible.

We Prioritize Rapid Response

It is in exactly no one’s interest for you to be stuck with a support issue, and we know that even little problems can escalate quickly. That’s why we offer 24/7/365 live support, as well as a guarantee that a call you put in for support will be responded to within one hour.

Managed IT Department

We make it simple for you to gain the benefits of an in-house IT department in addition to the advantages of a large and diverse team. We offer 24/7/365 live support so that you always have access to a technician when you need it. Our service also includes around-the-clock monitoring of your network and data, so that you can have the peace of mind to focus on growing your business instead of on technical hassles.

If your business operates multiple locations then our nationwide support coverage can provide the kind of rapid response that a conventional in-house IT department would struggle to match. And as different segments of your business grow, our managed support model allows us to easily scale with you.

Managed IT Services

At Cyber Command we understand that your staff’s time is valuable and that a team member who is troubleshooting a technical problem is doing so instead of directly profitable work. That’s why so many companies fall into the trap of only putting resources toward their IT infrastructure when there’s a problem to be resolved. Unfortunately, the most efficient time to deal with IT issues is before they reach the stage of being a problem.

Letting us manage your IT infrastructure for you means that, first of all, your entire team is able to focus their productivity on the work that directly benefits and grows your business. Secondly, our team has the depth of experience to proactively address potential issues before they can interfere with your operation. Our all-inclusive services include monitoring and maintenance of your devices and network, backups of your critical data, and more. Your focus stays on running your business.

Managed Print Services

The printing needs of different companies vary, but too often businesses address their printing needs by just connecting a few printers to the network and nothing more. This is both a missed opportunity and a security risk. Printers usually don’t receive the same attention to security as workstations, making them convenient entry points into the network for malicious actors. Printers may also expose sensitive data or user credentials.

Cyber Command can tailor a managed printing solution for your company’s specific needs. This will always include monitoring and attention to security vulnerabilities, but we can also help boost productivity by streamlining the way that your printers talk to the software you use. Additionally, we offer printer fleet management to handle toner replacement or any repairs.

Microsoft 365

Our team is familiar with a wide range of software solutions and that certainly includes Microsoft 365. We have the expertise to consult with you, in straightforward language, about how this flexible software can improve your company’s workflow and communication. We also have years of experience integrating and managing Microsoft 365, making it painless to adapt or scale as your company’s needs evolve.

Versatility and collaboration are more important today than ever. At Cyber Command we have the know-how to help you leverage Microsoft 365 to let your team work in a more streamlined way using tools they can easily access from different devices and locations.

The trend in recent years, and it’s an accelerating one, is for companies to become more and more distributed. Information technology has a major role in facilitating this and has made it so that a company trying to keep up with the competition faces challenges that didn’t exist even a decade ago.

Excell With Managed IT

At Cyber Command our expertise is in working with these technologies, both existing and emerging. Our focus, however, is always on you. On your productivity, and your ability to take your attention away from matters of maintenance and monitoring, and put it where it should be: growing your business and profits. Your success is ours, so everything always begins with a jargon-free discussion of your needs and how we can meet them.

Our value proposition is simple: We proactively monitor and maintain your devices, servers, and network to secure your revenue through business continuity. Schedule a technology strategy session with us today.