When it comes to business, today's landscape has never been more diverse from an IT perspective. As new challenges arise for businesses of all sizes, one thing remains: the IT support need. Let's start with a question: When you hire someone new, what's your process look like for getting them onboarded and prepped to start doing the work they were brought on to do? There's probably a set process from an HR perspective, as well as plenty of introductions, but what about from an IT perspective? Are you running out to the Apple store each time you hire someone new, dealing with your employees' IT support on an as-needed basis? By the way, it's okay if you're shaking your head yes right now. When your organization is small enough to managed the aspects of IT, you might not mind as much. But take a look at where your business is, and where it's going. Chances are you're going to grow past the At a certain level, the realistic situation is that you can probably get away with this when your organization is small. But that being said, it's never a bad time to take a look into planning what the growth of your IT needs looks like as well. I'm not beating around the bush on this one; let's talk Managed IT services.
What exactly does Managed IT Services Entail?
For starters, Managed IT services is a form of proactive planning on behalf of your business's future IT needs, while simultaneously addressing your current ones as well. A good rule of thumb when it comes to evaluating Managed IT services is weighing the benefits to your organization against the investment needed to make it work. Right off the bat one of the first things you'll notice is that with an established Managed IT service company in place, setup is a lot quicker, and more accurate than trying to set up each device individually. In essence as a Managed IT provider, we become an extension of your organization. With a substantial background in device management and deployment, you won't have to worry about taking time out of your day to make sure new devices are ready to go for the rest of your team. On the flip side, when it's time for an employee to move on, or to repurpose a machine in your fleet, having a device management solution in place makes the process practically painless. The same goes for a lost device. Don't lose sleep fretting over whether the confidential data on the phone your sales rep left in the back of the taxi 1200 miles away will come back to bite your organization. Through a solution mobile device management platform like Jamf, you lock or wipe it remotely from a central management console.
A Proactive Approach
With a managed IT services support model, you'll be able to get your employee focus on their work, rather than on their devices. Monitoring software can report if device hard drives start to fail, storage limitations, and more. It's better to know ahead of time, than try to pick up the pieces after a crucial component goes down. It's hard enough to run a business with everything running on all cylinders! Why chance the health of your IT?
Predictability
From a reactive standpoint, there's really no way to completely anticipate how many hours to budget towards IT per month. After all, you don't know what you don't know, right? After you add in the additional time it takes to correctly diagnose the problem of an unmanaged IT environment, there's a chance you'll blow your budget on something that otherwise could have easily avoided with proactive Managed IT services in place.
We run our managed IT services very similarly to the SaaS model. In fact, there's an actual term for this exact service; Management as a service (MaaS). We've gone a little further in classifying the different management scenarios we offer, but really at the end of the day the bottom line is that they're all a mixture of proactive monitoring and device management. This service type also opens up the ability to remotely manage instances all over the world. Most of the time, there's no need for on-site support (although we are always proactive to guarantee that we're there in-person when the scenario calls for it). We can fix many issues before they even show up on the end-user's radar, and it's faster and easier to support their device when we have the specifics about what version of the operating system they're on, what software is currently installed, the model of the device, etc.
While a Managed IT services might not fit every scenario, many times there's a version that will fit your organization's needs. If you've got more than just a couple Macs, iPhones, iPads, or other Apple devices in the hands of your employees, there's a good chance a managed IT services program could severely reduce your overall IT costs, cut back the downtime, and solidify your IT environment's security.
