Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, the work from home business model had been gaining popularity. Today, most businesses have adopted this mindset or at least a hybrid model of working from home a few days a week. As workers continue to work remotely, IT organizations face additional challenges including security threats, help desk overload, and increased costs.
A few things to think about to assess your IT support needs:
What does your current IT support look like?
There are typically three answers: You have a dedicated IT employee, an employee(s) takes on IT work as a second responsibility, or you outsource your IT support. Whatever the plan looks like, you want it to be reliable and efficient so there are no implications to productivity.
A managed service provider (MSP) would be able to take on IT management so your company can focus on its main objectives. An MSP is a company that offers IT support and tech support services on your behalf. The services they provide are customized to your organization’s IT support needs and can include 24/7 helpdesk services, network monitoring & management, cyber security protection, backup & recovery, and cloud management & migration. Managed service providers will work with different vendors to give their customers the best assistance.
What are your current response times?
Response times depend on how big your company is, the number of in-house IT employees, and how complex each IT issue is.
When outsourcing your IT management to a managed service provider, the company can proactively monitor your networks and systems to prevent IT issues from happening in the first place. Whereas without preventative remote monitoring, your IT person only knows there is a problem after it occurs.
In addition, your IT person goes home at the end of the day and takes sick days, vacations, and time off for holidays. A managed service provider can remotely monitor your networks 24/7, 365 days a year. With a larger team available, MSPs can track assets, hardware health, networks & servers, bandwidth & connectivity, and IT inventory management.
Can your IT support remotely monitor and perform maintenance?
With employees working from home, it is important to be able to monitor and perform maintenance virtually. No matter where your employees work, you can rely on a managed service provider helpdesk to resolve issues as quickly as possible so your team can focus on their jobs, not their IT issues.
How are you ensuring your systems are secure?
Unfortunately, your company’s network is always at risk of falling victim to cyber-attacks (read more from our blog post on cybersecurity), but this risk increases as employees work from home and connect to their internet.
It is more important than ever to partner with a managed service provider to ensure you have the highest level of security. MSPs can help your company prepare for cyber-attacks with backup & recovery planning, proactive monitoring of threats, 24/7 helpdesk, security awareness training, network security updates, and much more.
How are you backing up your systems?
All companies experience system failures and data loss. It is crucial to have a disaster recovery protocol. managed service providers can help ensure your data is safe and secure when failures occur by offering services such as end-to-end encryption, device & file-level backup, productivity cloud apps (like Microsoft 365), and local or virtual backup solutions.
Closing thoughts:
Running a business comes with many risks and headaches. Working with a managed service provider can keep productivity up, prevent issues from occurring and get you back up and running ASAP.
As a trusted Minnesota managed service provider, Now Micro is here to help with your business’s IT support. For additional information visit our Managed Services page.