Are you feeling stretched trying to keep up with the rapidly evolving world of technology?
For many small and midsize businesses, the pressure is there, in the need to:
- Bridge the IT skills gap.
- Maintain security certifications and practices.
- Address governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) requirements
- Ensure your systems stay up and running with minimal downtime.
- Scale your IT support as your company grows.
- Keep costs in check.
- Plan for the future.
It’s a lot to manage. And it’s not even a complete list.
That’s where IT consulting services and managed solutions can make all the difference. Today’s cost-effective IT options empower SMBs to benefit from enterprise-level infrastructure management and 24/7 support, even without a large in-house team.
A smart IT strategy isn’t just for big business; it can give small businesses the agility and resilience they need to compete, without breaking the bank.
Here are three key signs to help you decide when outsourcing is the smart next step.
Lack of Specialized IT Skills
Maybe your in-house IT talent struggles to meet security or compliance requirements. When you’re going for a security certification (such as SOC 2 or ISO 27001), your IT staff may be too busy handling daily support to meet current standards.
Or it might be time to migrate to the cloud, and your staff (understandably) isn’t skilled in this area. Perhaps you’re putting off implementing multifactor authentication, AI, or automation—or creating and testing a data backup and recovery plan. You may even be looking to hire a specialist for these projects but are having trouble finding one.
It’s vital to have access to security and compliance expertise, or you risk a fine or data breach. And delaying security and modernization initiatives can disappoint your customers or let your competitors get ahead of you.
You can solve these issues by adding IT talent on a per-project basis through a managed service provider (MSP).
By outsourcing specialized IT processes, you get scalable support. MSPs can provide everything from device-level maintenance to strategic consulting. This is especially valuable for SMBs who can’t afford to hire multiple specialists. You get the benefit of a full team of specialists on demand without the overhead of finding, hiring, and retaining employees.
Specialized help, especially around cybersecurity, gives you access to the latest and most advanced tools and practices, including vulnerability assessments, patch management, and incident response planning. For compliance, that might include governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) practices like risk management and control implementation.
Increased Downtime
When your in-house IT team doesn’t include specialists in all areas of your IT infrastructure, they might not recognize or have time to address issues before they cause downtime.
Your systems must be reliable to support productivity. If employees and customers can’t access vital apps, sites, and services when needed, you lose credibility and loyalty.
Another drawback to increased downtime caused by overburdened IT resources is that your IT staff isn’t able to focus on the core business.
When you outsource infrastructure support, you can expect to get a better level of support because you’re working with a team of specialists chosen specifically for the work at hand. A specialized team provides more uptime by keeping your systems proactively updated, addressing security vulnerabilities or hardware degradation before they cause downtime. MSPs can also offer 24/7 support, to cover your IT environment after hours without paying for a graveyard shift employee.
Growing Costs or Budget Pressure
In a tough economy, companies look to cut ongoing expenses like contracts for solutions they no longer need, or salaries for employees whose skills are only needed part-time or intermittently.
By outsourcing IT functions, you get cost efficiency. For example, hiring a system administrator can cost $85,000 to $100,000 annually for salary alone (excluding benefits, etc.), while an MSP offers scalable expertise across disciplines on demand.
Outsourcing helps companies:
- Audit and reallocate budgets to eliminate waste.
- Avoid legacy service overspending.
- Align spend with actual business priorities.
Services like a virtual CIO (vCIO) provide strategic planning and management for your IT environment to help ensure that IT spending aligns with your business objectives. vCIOs can create detailed, multi-year IT roadmaps that outline how technology investments will stay within a planned budget. This helps you anticipate technology needs and allocate funds for upgrades or new systems when needed.
Your MSP can also help you avoid tool sprawl by recommending solutions based on current business needs, eliminating systems with low adoption and redundant capabilities.
They can also reduce waste by helping you ensure you aren’t paying for tools you no longer need or use, which is especially easy to do in the era of auto-renewing contracts.
As part of this rightsizing, look for an MSP who doesn’t require locked-in contracts, so you get maximum flexibility with your IT spend. With this kind of flexibility, you can adjust your IT spend monthly based on changing needs.
Get Strategic With Your IT Spend
Getting access to specialized IT skills, boosting IT performance, and rightsizing your IT spend doesn’t have to be a struggle.
ISOutsource can help. Our IT services bridge skills gaps at your company on a temporary or ongoing basis with co-managed IT. Our flexible pricing is free of multi-year contracts, leaving you the option to stop or change your spending when you need to.
Contact us today to get started.
Common FAQ
What’s the best way for SMBs to get help with IT strategy and efficiency, like roadmaps and certifications?