To be a small business owner is to be a true autodidact. Nothing excites entrepreneurs more than rolling up their sleeves, learning new skills, and engaging in creative problem-solving. While this can-do attitude can serve them very well in business, there are times when it’s best to hand some elements of your operations over to the experts.
Most small businesses have neither the budget nor the expertise to manage their IT infrastructures in-house. And while attempting to do so may seem cost-effective, it inevitably leads to greater expense, increased downtime or flagging productivity in the long run.
Let’s go over a few reasons why you need managed IT services.
Avoid Surprise Costs
As the cost of doing business climbs, every enterprise wants to avoid unexpected costs. Managed IT services more than pay for themselves by helping start-ups like yours avoid surprise costs caused by outages, software failures, or hardware issues. Their predictable monthly fees are scalable in line with your company’s needs, and easy to integrate with your organisation’s financial planning.
Expertise On Demand
Speaking of costs – IT experts, like anyone who excels in their field, expect to be duly compensated for their hard work. Keeping one on payroll can insulate your business against risk but will be cost-prohibitive for many start-ups and SMEs.
Managed IT services allow you to access enterprise-grade IT expertise without hiring full-time staff. This ensures faster troubleshooting, smarter system setup, and better security, as and when you need them.
Provisions That Scale with You
As your company scales, so does your infrastructure. Therefore, so do your tech needs.
Upgrading your IT architecture alone can be a costly, disruptive and frustrating endeavour. Especially if you don’t have the in-house expertise to identify where your capital expenditure is best placed.
Managed service providers scale their provisions to match your business growth, providing solutions as and when you need them. This is done via modular upgrades such as cloud-based security, license migration and management, SaaS backups, VOIP connectivity, hardware upgrades and more.
All without having to switch providers or send operations grinding to a halt while you rebuild your mission-critical infrastructure.
State-Of-The-Art Protection
Start-ups are often easy targets for cyber criminals. After all, they have their hands full with getting their businesses up and running, finding their audience and perfecting their offerings. Rarely do they have the time or energy to consider cybersecurity. As such, they may adopt weak systems which are vulnerable to exploitation.
A managed IT service provider gives you affordable access to powerful cybersecurity tools, including:
- Real-time threat detection (also known as EDR – Endpoint Detection and Response)
- Spam filtering
- Cloud monitoring
- Data backup
- Cybersecurity training for staff
All of the above are proactively managed and regularly updated in line with new security threats. Remember, no business is too small or too young to be beneath the notice of cyber criminals, and even nascent businesses need to comply with customer data security and cybersecurity standards.
Managed IT services can take the legwork out of compliance by implementing best practices like data protection, access control, and password management. These reduce your risk profile and remove barriers to future growth.
Ready to focus on growing your business, not fixing IT issues? Talk to Wyvern Business Systems about scalable managed services for your start-up today!