Opting for managed IT services frees up the need for an in-house IT staff to manage, monitor and develop IT services to drive main business activities. Choosing a managed IT service provider can help you plan for the future of your company and take on new, competitive business projects.

Managed IT Services Vs. In-House IT Team

When weighing the pros and cons of managed IT services versus an in-house IT team, consider the following advantages of outsourcing IT:

Take control of IT costs

Managed service providers offer custom solutions that include basic service packages to daily services on a contracted or month-to-month maintenance fee. Rather than paying an IT staff a constant salary plus benefits, your company only has to pay for the services it uses. The cost savings will free up funds for investing in new desktops or tablets for your employees.

Get consistent, quality work from trained professionals

Training IT staff is time-consuming and costly. Managed service providers bring the skill and experience needed to build, service and maintain IT services on-premises or in the cloud. It is always a challenge to find well skilled and trained IT employees. With managed IT services, the burden of hiring professional IT staff is already taken care of.

Gain a competitive edge

One of the best business practices is to save money in one area and spend it on more important matters. This typically means your business needs to optimize daily IT operations and focus spending on generating new business, maintaining current clients and developing new innovative projects. Investing in a well-designed and managed IT infrastructure can help accomplish these goals. A managed services provider minimizes IT costs so you can focus the budget on extending access to mobile users, improving or building a virtual infrastructure and jumping in with big data.

Deploy new projects quicker

Quality managed service providers can build, test, engineer and deploy a new system much faster than an internal IT staff. Look for IT service providers that are eager to collaborate with stakeholders to bring your IT vision to life.

Improved security

Building a secure IT infrastructure cannot be done overnight. This involves several hours of configuring hardware and software, monitoring, adjusting, policy setting and configuring user access settings. A managed service provider can perform these tasks with minimal direction and guidance — ramping up security while decreasing labor costs.

Unbiased reporting

Let’s face it: Employees are more likely to be loyal to each another than to supervisors. An unbiased third-party IT consultant helps you determine where IT resources can best be utilized. A third-party evaluation can also reveal money-saving opportunities and show how employees are using resources.

For instance, if employees keep several gigabytes of personal data on shared network drives, this data can be cleaned up to open more storage space for new projects. Businesses have no other way of knowing what resources can be freed up, where they could be better utilized and which areas lack resources.

Availability of IT support

Managed service providers are a dedicated resource to your business. If an on-premises IT staff member goes on vacation or is out sick, your business is down one person to manage the infrastructure. However, managed IT providers are always on-call. Having an interchangeable IT staff also saves time and money because you no longer have to wait for services.

Consistency and efficiency

Network issues can result in prolonged downtime and cost your business valuable time and money. With the vast tools available for managed service providers, IT issues are quickly resolved.

Employee salaries don’t stop when the network goes down and they cannot work. Your business needs employees to be productive, and a managed IT service provider can reduce the amount of downtime and wasted money. Through proper maintenance, planning and strategic updates and patches, IT support can schedule everything, eliminating disruptions to your employees during business hours.

Custom solutions support scalability

Many small to mid-sized businesses need help planning their IT infrastructure. Managed IT service providers can design a solution that is tailored to fit your specific business needs. This will enable your business to scale its IT infrastructure as it grows and combine multiple technologies to support an evolving workload and performance goals. An adaptive service provider will quickly become a welcomed asset to any business.

Consider Agile IT for your managed service needs

An experienced managed service provider helps you leverage the cloud to cut costs and work more productively. As a cloud-first managed services provider, Agile IT successfully manages hundreds of desktops while advising companies on ways to consolidate and save through cloud technologies.

Still unsure whether outsourced managed IT services is the right option for your business? Learn more about our AgileCover managed IT services, or reach out to us today.