If you are like many businesses, you use a lot of services from other companies to try and get all the business computing you need, without having to buy new servers and pay company IT administrators to look after them. This process is understandable, but are you really saving money by doing it? This month we will take a look at the myriad of services that businesses use and if it is, as advertised, saving them money.
Preface
Before we get into each IT-related sector, we have to preface this whole thing with the fact that shifting typically capital expenses to more operational expenses has value in itself. Firstly, your business isn’t going to get caught too off guard with huge IT-related expenses because of the nature of the payment structure. Since everything you pay for is combined in one monthly cost, it is much easier to predict what your operational outlay will be while still being able to innovate and support an efficient and dynamic IT infrastructure.
Cloud Services
Some of the most utilized services that you get are cloud services that provide your business with the digital resources it needs to function. Some businesses have taken this strategy to the limit in recent years, running their management, productivity, collaboration, marketing, communications, and more from cloud services.
Cloud services have a lot of benefits for businesses. They are billed per month on usage or on a static per-user contract (for SaaS applications). This not only provides a reliable product that’s underlying IT is consistently managed, it allows businesses to budget the per-user application cost as a part of their operational budget. On the other hand, users need a reliable Internet connection to use the cloud-based resources, which isn’t as big of a deal for some organizations as it is for others.
Nowadays there is so much that your business can do from the cloud that it may not even be a consideration to build an internal IT infrastructure the way that most businesses have done up until very recently. There are some very serious benefits to building your own IT infrastructure, but this does come at the cost of some very considerable investments. This is why modern businesses always looking to do more with the money they have available (thereby hoping to avoid huge investments in their IT) can potentially do so by using the resources to be found in the cloud. A word of caution, though: it can actually be more expensive to outfit your workforce with all the cloud-hosted tools they need if it isn’t approached strategically.
Managed IT Services
On the other hand, if your business has made an investment in their IT beyond the month-to-month cloud application and computing costs, one of the biggest expenses for the lifespan of that technology is the expert management and maintenance of it. It can be prohibitive to have a computing infrastructure if you are paying several people $50-$120K to manage it every year. It’s no surprise that lots of businesses have moved to cloud computing resources with that kind of bill.
Managed IT services do quite a bit to make having an in-house, company-owned IT infrastructure possible. Not only does an outsourced IT provider have some of the very best IT technicians in Florida looking after your business’ technology needs, it also costs a fraction of paying in-house technicians. That makes it possible to have an IT administrator and a whole support team that actively manages and maintains all of your business’ information systems.
The thing is, the managed IT services don’t end at remote support, even though it is among our most valuable offerings. Well…it can be, but so can full IT vendor management, or the comprehensive backup and disaster recovery platform, or the knowledge and expertise on how to deploy new technology to solve the operational pain points that your business has.
Basically, managed IT services, if you are able to get comprehensive service from a dedicated and expert-laden company like Grove Networks, pay for themselves. With our managed IT services, you will see less downtime, more optimally-working technology, vendor management and support, end user support with our useful help desk, and much, much more.
The fact is that even if you choose to have an in-house or onsite IT administrator or CIO that handles the lion’s share of your advanced IT management and strategy, managed IT services can help you stabilize your management and support costs and keep your business’ IT up and running regardless of the situation. Not only that, our knowledgeable consultants can keep your business compliant with any regulations your business operates under; lifting the regulatory headaches that many business leaders have to deal with.
Regardless of how you want to set up your business’ IT infrastructure—whether that is to use services to try and restructure your cost profile, or if you choose to host your own—you can depend on the IT professionals at Grove Networks. Give us a call to strategize about the best technology situation for your business.
