IT budgets continue to increase each year as business needs evolve, requiring more digital needs and larger infrastructure—according to Spiceworks, 88 percent of organizations expect their IT budgets to stay the same or grow in 2020. Businesses are looking to replace older operating systems by providing hardware such as laptops and to improve security setups to protect sensitive business and personal data.  

Managed service budgets are also growing; spend on managed services increased from 6 percent of total IT spend in 2019 to 10 percent in 2020. Organizations are spending money on a number of managed services, including hosting, storage and backup, and IT support, among other others.

With additional IT projects to manage, businesses of all sizes are looking for help handling lower-priority initiatives, such as IT support, so that their IT teams can focus on completing projects that have high impact for their organization. In this article, we review three compelling reasons for choosing a managed service provider to handle IT support.

1. Experienced and qualified workers

The days of an IT worker acting as a jack-of-all-trades are long gone. With technology growing more complex, and a greater focus on security, it is important to have IT support staff who are not only trained in specific technologies, but also have hands-on experience with those technologies.

When one configuration error could leak your company’s intellectual property, expose customer financial data, or take critical business systems offline, you want to be sure that your IT staff has the right training and the experience to eliminate mistakes. Outsourcing your IT support means that you have highly trained people who have the required experience to handle the complexities that are common in modern-day technology when you need them.

2. Control costs

Hiring and training IT support staff is not only expensive, but it is time-consuming. Having to hire employees with specialized skill sets in different hardware, software, networking, and security technologies winds up costing a great deal of money in salaries and training to keep their skills up to date. Not only that, but managers are then pulled away for interviews, onboarding, and other tasks necessary to bring in newly hired staff.

In addition to these costs, there are also the costs associated with attrition. As IT support workers gain more skills and experience, their value increases. If you are unable to meet their growing salary demands, there is a good chance that they will move on to an employer that can afford to pay them more, starting the cycle all over again. By outsourcing IT support, you have personnel at the ready in order to assist with any number of needs. Better still, they have been vetted by their employer, so there is little need to investigate their skills and background.

3. Implementation speed

Something that often stalls new IT projects is the lack of time and resources that are required. Handling the implementation of a new system or application in house could delay things for months as you wait for other projects to be completed and train or hire the right staff.

Relying on outsourced IT support gives you the means to start up new projects when you are ready. Once you meet with your project manager, your partner can provide you with the temporary staff you need in order to implement your project without having to wait.

Running a business means relying on technology to get things done. Without the right people serving in your IT support roles, you put business processes, security, and compliance at risk. Avoiding this starts with making sure the right people are in place.

Originally published July 2016 and updated April 2020.