Managed IT Services Provide Good Value for SMBs

Every business needs technology support. This statement is more true today than it has ever been before. As your organization adds new technology to its infrastructure, it will naturally grow more complex and difficult to maintain. Thankfully, you don’t necessarily have to go about this alone. By working with an outsourced third party, your business can take advantage of all kinds of great solutions for a fraction of the cost.

Depending on the way you go about technology maintenance, you can either wind up investing in your business’s future or wasting vital capital. Traditional break-fix IT strategies take a responsive approach to IT maintenance. By this, we mean that you’re reacting to issues as they crop up rather than preventing them outright. This is not the ideal way to approach IT maintenance, as you will spend more time and resources addressing issues that could have been avoided in the first place. Instead of traditional break-fix, you should consider investing in a more preventative approach to technology maintenance.

If you want preventative solutions, your business is better off working with a managed IT service provider like Directive. Managed IT takes advantage of solutions that are designed to detect issues before they become costly problems. This affords your business ample time to resolve them, which mitigates downtime and the costs of replacing technology. Here are a couple of ways that managed IT can help your business save time and money:

• Security: Have you ever been the victim of an online security threat? Chances are that if you have, it’s a situation that you’ll never want to suffer from again. The issue with security is that it’s costly and embarrassing to be hit by a hacking attack. You not only have to remove the threats from your infrastructure, but you also can’t work until it has been done. Furthermore, you might be subject to fine and other regulations regarding data privacy, which is just the icing on the cake. Preventing these issues with a firewall, antivirus, spam blocker, and content filter can make for a much more tolerable security situation.
• Hardware issues: A computer breaking down can be a considerable problem for your business. Hardware failure could mean a workstation or even a server unit breaking down, which could lead to data loss or a loss of operations. If you can use remote monitoring and management to provide maintenance as needed, you can keep the risk of a hardware failure at a low. Furthermore, you can detect signs of hardware failure early on if you’re monitoring your network, which helps you avoid unexpected hardware breakdowns.
• Data backup: Imagine that your entire data infrastructure has just been destroyed due to an unforeseen event, like a data breach or a natural disaster. What do you do? If you haven’t taken any action to ensure your data is safely backed up, it’s likely that your business won’t be able to function as intended for quite some time. This puts your future in jeopardy. Proactive solutions like Data Backup and Disaster Recovery, or BDR, can ensure that your business suffers minimal downtime and data loss in the event of a disaster. Furthermore, you should have a comprehensive business continuity strategy implemented to guarantee you know how to react in the event of such an incident.

Does your business need managed IT support? Directive can help your business take better care of its technology. To learn more, reach out to us at 607.433.2200.