5 Reasons How IT Support Can Help Startups

professionally managed IT services
professionally managed IT services

IT support is one of the most crucial aspects of running a business in 2022. However, things are often quite difficult for startups. These new enterprises are often overextended, understaffed, and underfunded. At the same time, quality IT support doesn’t come cheap. This is why the majority of enterprises decide to solve this problem by outsourcing. Here are the top five reasons why outsourcing your IT support can make a massive difference.

Better Maintenance

IT systems used in your enterprise need a high level of maintenance. Now, in the majority of industries that do business online, this maintenance needs to be 24/7. Sure, you may automate a part of your process in order to receive orders even outside of your working hours but this is heavily reliant on your IT infrastructure. If something goes wrong here, you risk entering a downtime.

This maintenance can range from something as serious as a server failure or a problem of a smaller scope, like slow Wi-Fi. If nothing else, your IT experts can provide personal assistance to your team members, when it comes to setting up their profiles or hardware. This is especially useful if you plan to rely heavily on the BYOD model.

All in all, professionally managed IT services give your company’s IT processes a higher level of reliability and more layers of resilience.

IT Security

Another massive advantage of getting proper IT support is the issue of IT security. When using cloud-based tools, you’re somewhat exposing your own personal data, as well as the data of your users to the worldwide web. This is incredibly risky, seeing as how you should never gamble with your own data and the loss of user data may make you legally liable. At the very least, your reputation will take a hit.

The biggest misconception of startups is that they’re too small to be a legitimate target. On the one hand, stealing your data and resources doesn’t offer as big of a reward but, at the same time, seeing as how your cybersecurity isn’t as strong, the risk is lower, as well.

In other words, you’re never too small to be a target of a cyberattack. If anything, the consequences of a successful attack will be much worse for your own enterprise than they would be otherwise.

Cost-effectiveness

Ask yourself one question – can I even afford in-house IT support. Starting your own IT department is an ambitious project. You need to hire suitable candidates (which is, on its own, an expensive project), buy the hardware, provide them with the right licenses, and even make sure that everything runs as it’s supposed to. In other words, it’s a gargantuan effort and it will take years until you reach the break-even point.

With outsourcing, you get this same quality of service right away. Is it less expensive? Well, it depends on the perspective. Over the course of years, the costs are comparable (perhaps even in favour of in-house handling of things). Still, it’s worth pointing out that there’s no initial investment, which is one of the biggest cost-related factors.

Lastly, it’s also worth keeping in mind that time is a (finite) resource. By outsourcing, you’re skipping the entire onboarding phase, which means that you get the results right away.

Responsiveness

While we’ve already discussed maintenance, real-time response is something else entirely. If there’s a problem, it needs to be resolved right away. This is something that’s incredibly difficult to resolve in-house. As we’ve already discussed, it would require a massive team, working in shifts around the clock. With outsourced IT support, you can easily get someone on the line any time of the day.

In a moment of crisis (server going down, etc.), you need someone who will be on the problem right away. When choosing a host, you’re most likely looking at uptime (99.99%) as one of the most important factors, however, when something unplanned occurs, the responsiveness of your IT support will make a difference.

All in all, you want someone on the other end of the line any time of the day. You also want them ready and willing to start working on the problem right away.

Delegating Administrative Tasks

As an entrepreneur, you’ll already have too many tasks and responsibilities on your plate. The last thing you need is to worry about a staff member quitting unexpectedly, thus leaving your IT support short-staffed. Finding a replacement for a specialist (and a suitable replacement at that) is always difficult. By outsourcing your IT support, you’re ensuring that this is someone else’s problem.

Another thing you gain by taking this route is much higher scalability. This means that, at the moment, you’re using the capabilities of the agency that you’re working with according to your own needs. If your startup is off to a slow start, you can always downscale. Later on, expansion is just as easy.

Overall, as a startup leader, you already have too much on your plate. Any chance to downsize your list of mandatory administrative tasks should be more than welcome.

In Conclusion

We’ve already mentioned it as one of the factors but it’s definitely worth stressing the importance of cost-efficiency once again. When you have a problem, it’s not your priority to find an efficient solution – you need to find an efficient solution that you can actually afford. This is why outsourcing is so popular in this field and why its popularity keeps growing year in and year out.