Small- to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) are often under pressure to juggle a tight budget. Many SMBs tend to allot smaller budgets for IT because SMB owners think of IT as a non-critical component. They'd rather allot bigger budgets for hiring operations staff and purchasing IT equipment. As a result, IT team members in SMBs have to be a jack-of-all-trades who performs menial tasks like installing cables and complicated jobs like generating analytics reports.
Managed services providers (MSPs) like Arnet Technologies can help you free up your internal IT resources, bring in enterprise-level IT capabilities, and provide expert services at any time.
Here are some solutions MSPs can provide that in-house IT can’t:
IT reports and audits
Businesses generate an incredible amount of data nowadays, and not using this data and analytics to improve business processes would be a terrible waste. In-house IT staff typically deal with any and all tech-related activities, leaving them with little time to generate reports and audits. Report writing isn’t generally an IT priority, even more so with smaller businesses that have limited resources for hiring tech personnel. Nevertheless, an organization can benefit from having them.
In contrast, MSPs are obligated to generate reports because their customers will demand thorough reporting. MSPs track all kinds of information that will help them reduce the volume of support calls they receive, which aims to reduce overhead. You can even request specific data such as network security reports, backup testing scores, and monthly downtime reports.
Quick turnaround updates
Many people don’t realize that even a small system comprised of an operating system (OS), one or two productivity apps, and a single antivirus app would have quite a busy update load. Most successful apps have periodic minor updates on a month-to-month basis, while OS updates are often released every quarter. Updates for antivirus and other security programs have an even smaller turnaround window and may come in a matter of days or even hours, depending on the severity and urgency of the threats.
Of course, you can simply set your system and app updates to “automatic” so you don't have to download and patch the updates yourself. However, there are a lot of common updates for antiviruses and minor updates for most applications, and you may easily miss patching all of them.
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Managed services providers will typically also automate updates and patches for you and keep a close record of the updates released for purposes of reporting. They can also ensure that the updates are installed during off-hours to cause as little disruption to operations as possible.
IT consulting
Ideally, your IT team should be evolving and improving as the tech landscape does. However, small business IT teams likely have no extra time to spend on researching and studying system improvements. Moreover, businesses' IT departments might also have to do things like research vendors and installation methods to improve operational efficiency — something SMBs might not have the resources for.
With outsourced IT services, you won’t need to worry about your IT staff stretching themselves too thin trying to meet the company’s demands. MSPs are staffed with highly trained industry specialists who can make sure that you always have industry-specific and up-to-date information regarding your IT needs.
Arnet Technologies is Ohio’s premier technology solutions provider. We’ll help eliminate all your worries related to compliance, security, IT management, and support. Click here to schedule your strategy session.
