West Century’s Managed IT Services lightens the technological load of clients, providing next-generation managed services to help them get on with the business of doing business.
Managed services are the way of the future because they allow companies to discover and address technical issues before they can take a negative toll on your business. Thanks to proactive service and regular maintenance, you can rest assured your computer network will run smoothly and efficiently.
Technology changes at a lightning-fast pace. Technical marvels have increased productivity and collaboration but keeping up with the evolving landscape can be both challenging and time-consuming. Additionally, as a business grows, its IT requirements will inevitably change. Allowing West Century IT Solutions to shoulder some of the responsibility can help reduce and control costs, provide scalability while increasing efficiency and competitiveness.
What are the benefits of Managed IT?
Managed IT Services have become popular, as many companies either don’t have the resources or find it cost-prohibiting to hire staff, purchase and maintain expensive equipment, keep software and systems up and running, manage security, and make executive decisions about complex subjects that affect their bottom line.
With our Managed IT Services, you’ll be paying the same amount regardless of how much support you need each month. This means you’ll know exactly what to budget and exactly what service you’ll receive, allowing you to be more flexible when investing in other areas of your business.
An IT budget consists of many items, including:
- hardware costs
- software and network infrastructure
- maintenance costs
- IT labor
The managed service model allow businesses to easily predict their IT expenses on a monthly basis and are able to better plan and budget for larger IT projects and improvements.
Managed IT Services help you offset the initial investment of technology costs. Rather than spending thousands of dollars on hardware and software upfront, you pay for the service through a low monthly investment. Because the service is an operational expense and not a capital expenditure, you don’t have nearly as many resources tied up in managing your business technology. Plus, updating to new software is included in your service, meaning you won’t incur additional charges just for keeping your technology up-to-date.
As business owners and IT directors, you look to technology to improve productivity and enhance the way you do business. When your technology doesn’t do that, there’s a problem.
Anytime your users can’t work, you lose money. According to IDC’s data, unplanned downtime costs organizations $58,118 per year for every 100 users. The average employee was losing 12.4 hours a year due to server downtime and 6.2 hours a year for network downtime. By implementing Managed IT Services, they were able to reduce server and network downtime by more than 85 percent.
This benefit is in direct relation to staff productivity and specifically related to your IT department. All too often, we see IT staff consumed with resolving user issues or fixing malfunctioning equipment. These tasks take their focus off their core responsibilities. By outsourcing the tasks and management of your IT environment to a managed services provider, your staff – those in IT and those not in IT – can remain focused on the more important priorities.
Switching to a Managed IT provider reduces infrastructure costs in a number of different ways. When a Managed IT provider takes control of your infrastructure, you are able to downsize the amount of infrastructure you have on-site by using their data centers. You not only save on the cost of the hardware, but also on the energy it uses and the space required to house it.
Additionally, you’ll see savings related to licensing, training and consulting. All of these needs are covered by a single, monthly investment. These services don’t go away to save you money, but rather, they are all streamlined and better managed via a single provider.
This is a major and important benefit to managed IT services. Business owners have little to no time to spend thinking about their IT infrastructure, worrying about things such as the dependability and speed of the network connections, and other concerns. By working with an MSP they are afforded the luxury of all-day, every-day, around-the-clock coverage.
Security solutions and services such as RMM are always working to detect potential threats, vulnerabilities, or potential disturbances. When you provide fully managed IT support, bugs and issues can most often be troubleshot and remediated before they are ever a concern to the business owner. Owners are happy to pay for such a service, as CEOs and others have no time to be verifying that backups are done properly. It has become more than clear that data management on the cloud is expected to yield more managed services revenue in the coming year, and when business work with the right MSP they are able to take advantage of proactive business continuity solutions by combining RMM intelligence with regular and encrypted backups, cloud computing, and virtualization.
As your business grows, its support structure needs to grow, too. When you use a Managed IT Service you can scale your business up or down with nothing more than a simple discussion with your provider. If you hire on 10, 15 or even 50 employees, they can support them. Similarly, if you’re not using a certain application in cloud computing, you can easily get rid of it.
Managed IT service is the ultimate in flexibility, capable of expanding and contracting based on your business needs. This is particularly useful in your business’s early years and during periods of significant growth when things can change at a moment’s notice.
There are so many variations of technology that store and transmit data nowadays, including tablets, operating systems, servers, smartphones, laptops and more. Because data is stored and transmitted on these devices it means their security is critical. Many business owners live in fear that they will fall victim to a security breach. As a managed service provider it is your job to make them well aware of the risks, sharing examples that have been highlighted in the media and explaining how their data and compliance practices are compromised when such an event arises.
It is also crucial you address the business owners concerns about compliance, especially in industries such as health and legal, where compliance is a major concern. For these people it is important they work with a provider that is HIPAA compliant and in addition, can implement other ways to supplement additional managed security protocol, policies, and procedures.