There may have been a time when you weren’t ready to outsource your IT to a managed services provider. However, just because you weren’t prepared to take such an important step then doesn’t mean you aren’t ready now.
At its core, a Managed Services Provider (MSP) is an organisation prepared to handle some or even all of the critical functions your in-house IT department would usually perform. This can include and is not limited to maintenance and upgrades but also resource provisioning, cybersecurity, and more.
Below are six key signs that prove the time is right to enlist the help of an MSP for your business.
1. You’re Running Out of Resources
Maybe the biggest sign that you’re ready to outsource IT to an MSP is also the most pressing.
If you find that you’re frequently stretching the few resources you have because you’re constantly dealing with IT-related issues, the chances are that you need to bring in outside assistance to help correct the matter as soon as possible.
When positioned correctly, your IT should enable your more comprehensive strategy and your long-term goals as a business. It should empower your people to do their best and continue to innovate and redefine their “best” daily.
If people spend too much of their time putting out fires or desperately trying to make things work, your IT is no longer propelling you forward – it is holding you back.
An MSP can help make your IT an integral part of your organisation. If something goes wrong, your MSP will handle it — freeing up your employees’ time so they can focus on and pay attention to the essential things.
2. A Bigger Business May Lead to Bigger Breaches Too
As a business professional, growth is understandably one of your top priorities. As you bring new employees into the fold, you may have to expand your resources which requires adding more hardware to already complex infrastructure. Provisioning these resources correctly guarantees everyone has access to what they need to do their job efficiently.
However, increasing staff and devices may also mean an increased risk of breaches, which is something you cannot afford. Never forget that every device connected to a network is a potential vulnerability just waiting to be exploited by someone who knows what they’re doing. Likewise, consider statistics like the following:
- According to this recent study, it takes businesses an average of six months to detect a data breach that has already happened.
- Approximately 43% of all cyberattacks target small businesses.
- Nearly 91% of those attacks begin with a simple phishing email.
- Most businesses that suffer from an attack will close permanently within six months.
Again, an MSP can help enormously in these situations. They focus on ensuring that your cybersecurity strategy is as strong as it can be so you can get back to focusing on the most important thing: running the business you’ve worked so hard to build.
3. Your Business is Growing… But Your IT Isn’t
Another one of the significant signs that you’re ready to outsource IT to an MSP is also one of the hardest to identify. As your business grows, your environment becomes more complex over time.
As you continue adding resources, employees need to figure out complicated workarounds to complete workflows. At some point, what used to be a simple job may become time-consuming and frustrating.
As you continue to expand, you may notice that your people are spending more and more effort on temporary fixes to problems that shouldn’t exist in the first place. With the right MSP, this effort could be better applied elsewhere. Not only can they help you construct the unique IT infrastructure you need to support your people and their processes, but they can also do so in a way that allows things to scale effortlessly over time.
4. The Problem With Legacy Systems
You’re also ready to outsource IT to an MSP if you A) are still maintaining legacy systems that are woefully out of date and B) want to break free from this vicious cycle but aren’t sure where to start.
Legacy systems may have worked well for your business five years ago, but the organisation you’re running today is likely very different than it was at that time. It’s also prohibitively expensive to support something that has reached the end of its life and is no longer getting the job done.
An MSP becomes a viable way to guarantee that all of your critical equipment continues to function well and at a fraction of the cost you’d be paying if you were doing everything yourself.
5. You Need Visibility, and You Need it Now
Like the complexity issue, losing viability in your infrastructure is likely something that happens slowly over time. It’s also something you don’t realise is so important until you suddenly find that you don’t have it.
If you don’t have visibility into your IT, there is no way to understand how things work together to form something more potent than one asset on its own.
An MSP can easily step in and give you a much better understanding of how technology ties into your critical business functions, thus allowing you to capitalise on opportunities for improvement as they happen instead of watching them pass you by.
6. You’re Dealing With a Skills Gap
Finally, another sign that you’re ready for the help of an MSP has to do with situations where you need people with specialised, IT-related skills. Your in-house IT people may be spending their time on the general day-to-day maintenance of your systems and solutions and not focusing their energy on the more skill-specific tasks that would get you closer to achieving your goals.
An MSP can step in to handle all of this day-to-day maintenance on your behalf and give your people the opportunity to be innovative rather than simply sticking to the status quo.
The Partner You Need, the Results You Deserve
At Datcom, part of the way that we help businesses like yours address challenges like these involves our Discovery Assessment. It’s a process that allows us to learn as much as possible about your business so that we can come up with an IT approach tailored to your needs and will give you the reliability and dependability you’re currently lacking.
If you’re ready to outsource your IT to an MSP or would like to discuss our Discovery Assessment in more detail, contact Datcom today.