Outsourcing your IT support to a Managed Service Provider can work wonders for your business's bottom line. Discover how MSPs can supercharge your IT operations, optimize costs, and provide specialized expertise to help your organization thrive in today's fast-paced digital landscape.
We see you, managers and chairpersons of the world, wearing as many hats as your company needs you to. And we see you also, various employees who work under them, putting in countless hours perfecting your craft and dialing in your abilities to be effective and efficient in the workplace.
And with all of those tasks and projects all of you are taking on every day, there’s one thing that is likely standing in your way: IT issues.
Troubleshooting IT issues while trying to work on a project can be infuriating. A lot of times, the folks we end up working with are those who are fed up with spending their time tinkering with technology.
However, hiring internal IT can be expensive. The average IT professional in the US is paid around $102,423 per year, with an average salary of $83,332. That’s one IT professional putting out fires every day when they should be focusing on bigger-picture strategies.
Enter Manager Service Providers or MSPs. These partners run your entire IT department for you, and while costs vary from business to business, MSPs tend to be the most cost-effective solution for businesses– said differently, multitudes more support for a fraction of the cost.
Still not convinced? Don’t fret, that’s exactly why we’re here today, to discover five specific ways outsourcing your IT support can help your bottom line, or more simply hiring an MSP can help you by:
- Freeing Up Resources
- Boosting Productivity
- Saving on Hardware
- Simplifying Your Budget
- Improving Data Security
But First… What are Managed Service Providers?
In the past decade, MSP organizations have themselves as a crucial solution for businesses seeking to optimize their IT operations and cut down costs related to staying up to date with the rapidly evolving challenges of the modern marketplace.
In their report, 'The Evolving Landscape of the MSP Business,' Barracuda found MSPs are anticipating a remarkable average growth of 33% in 2023 alone. These specialized service providers offer an array of IT management and support for organizations of all sizes, encompassing digital infrastructure, applications, and processes.
In essence, enlisting the services of an MSP means entrusting them with the responsibility of monitoring, maintaining, and enhancing your company's IT systems. This allows your in-house team to concentrate on their actual jobs while significantly benefiting from the expertise and efficiency of external IT professionals who are always there to support your endeavors.
Opting for a third-party MSP empowers you to harness the provider's extensive knowledge and experience in managing IT environments, without the need to recruit, hire, train, and continuously retrain an in-house team of IT specialists for the same tasks. MSPs, like our team at PTG, typically offer a wide array of services, including network monitoring, cybersecurity, data backup and recovery, software updates, and even 24/7 help desk support.
So with no further ado, let’s get to the five ways outsourcing your IT support can help your bottom line.
1. MSPs Free Up Your Resources
Hiring an MSP offers businesses the gigantic advantage of freeing up internal resources that can be better used elsewhere. By delegating IT responsibilities to an MSP, your company's in-house team can redirect their focus towards core business activities, whatever those may be for you. This shift enables your team to innovate and strategize for overall growth without being burdened by day-to-day IT management.
With an MSP taking care of the IT tasks for your team, you’ll avoid the time-consuming and costly process of recruiting, hiring, and training an extensive team of IT specialists as we mentioned previously. The MSP's dedicated professionals bring a wealth of knowledge and experience, eliminating the need for constant retraining and ensuring that your company can still benefit from the latest advancements in the IT industry. This liberation of internal resources will empower your business to scale effectively and remain agile in a rapidly changing technological landscape.
2. MSPs Can Help Boost Your Company's Productivity
With the burden of IT management lifted from the shoulders of the in-house team, employees are able to channel their energy and focus into their core responsibilities, resulting in increased productivity and efficiency. Your team will have more time to dedicate to essential tasks, true innovation, and strategic projects that impact your company's success.
Additionally, MSPs possess a wealth of expertise that can cast a shadow over anything an in-house IT team could build. MSPs easily streamline processes and workflows, ultimately leading to improved productivity across the board. With 24/7 proactive monitoring and rapid issue resolution, it’s your MSP’s job to ensure that IT downtime is minimized, enabling employees to work without interruption, and promoting a seamless workflow.
As a result of this vigilance, your company can maintain a competitive edge and meet customer demands efficiently, driving overall productivity and delivering enhanced value to your clients, no matter what it is your team does. Embracing the expertise and capabilities of an MSP empowers businesses to thrive in today's fast-paced digital landscape, where productivity and efficiency are paramount for sustainable success.
3. MSPs Help Your Business Save Money on Hardware
Outsourcing your IT work to an MSP offers substantial cost-saving benefits when it comes to hardware expenses. With an MSP managing your IT infrastructure, there's no need for heavy upfront investments in purchasing and maintaining hardware equipment. For the record, IT hardware can range from servers to networking devices and computers, storage solutions, and plenty of other essential components depending on what your team needs.
It’s impossible to say how much this will run your specific company without a detailed list of items, but the cost of these necessities can range from hundreds to thousands of dollars for even the smallest business – and a comprehensive setup for a medium-sized business could potentially run into tens of thousands or more. The burden of acquiring and updating servers, networking devices, and other costly hardware components shifts to the MSP, which ensures that the infrastructure remains up-to-date and reliable.
MSPs offer scalable services to fit the size and necessities of nearly every kind of organization, tailoring them to your business's needs to avoid overprovisioning and unnecessary costs. Efficient hardware management and strategic planning let your team optimize your IT expenses, redirecting funds to critical areas of your day-to-day while maintaining a robust IT infrastructure.
4. MSPs Help Simplify Your Budget
We’ve touched on it plenty, but hiring an MSP is the absolute best way to simplify your IT budget while maintaining a fully-operational IT department. With an MSP like us at PTG, your business can transition from unpredictable and fluctuating IT costs – the norm in today’s impossible-to-predict market – to a more stable fee structure. This predictable pricing model allows for better financial planning and budgeting for your finance team, eliminating unexpected expenses related to IT maintenance, upgrades, and emergency support. It’s all built in!
By consolidating various IT services under a single provider, your business can streamline its budgeting process, gain better visibility into your IT expenses, and allocate resources more efficiently to other areas of your organization. This simplification contributes to overall financial stability and enables businesses to focus on their core operations and growth strategies.
5. Great MSPs Will Help You Improve Your Data Security
At the end of the day, the best MSPs are highly equipped with a specialized focus on cybersecurity, employing the latest technologies and best practices to safeguard your team’s sensitive information, of which you probably have plenty. Leveraging advanced threat detection and prevention tools, performing regular security assessments, and participating in continuous monitoring means your MSP will be able to identify and mitigate potential risks before they escalate into major security breaches.
Utilizing a proactive approach helps protect the business from various cyber threats, including malware, ransomware, phishing attacks, and data breaches. This minimizes the potential financial and reputational damage that these kinds of incidents can cause.
Additionally, MSPs implement robust data backup and disaster recovery solutions, ensuring that critical data is regularly backed up and securely stored in off-site locations – something most small- and medium-sized businesses can hardly afford. This means that in the event of a data loss due to hardware failure, cyber attack, or even natural disasters, your business can quickly recover its valuable information without experiencing prolonged downtime.
Conclusion
Outsourcing IT support to a managed service provider can offer your team countless benefits that directly impact their bottom line. By freeing up internal resources, boosting productivity, saving on hardware costs, simplifying budgeting, and enhancing data security, your business can focus on what you do best, your core operations, and experience substantial financial savings while not giving up an ounce of IT coverage.
MSPs carry specialized expertise, a proactive approach to cybersecurity, and data backup solutions that provide peace of mind and reliability, ensuring your organization can adapt to the rapidly evolving digital landscape easily. Embracing the services of an MSP empowers businesses to remain competitive, efficient, and financially sustainable in today's dynamic marketplace.
If you are interested in learning more about how to get the most out of your technology, give us a call at (864) 552-1291 and we'll help you evaluate capabilities and options. Also, sign up for PTG Tech Talk for monthly tech news, and consider following us on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter!
