Written by Xuan Luan for I-Net Dynamics

With the speed of technology growth and how it is impacting every aspect of modern society, organizations and businesses have been putting more and more emphasis on their IT readiness. One important consideration is whether your IT system and support are adequate for your growing business.

By this point, you have probably heard quite a bit about businesses’ adoption of cloud, AI, and different levels of IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS. The main theme here is leveraging the suitable expertise and resources for your needs instead of handling everything locally. By ensuring you have the right resources, properly trained personnel to provide the right end-user assistance, impacts more than just downtime; it impacts the bottom line, your scalability, and the ability to implement new technologies.

In this article, we look into traditional IT support and managed services to see their key differences and why we think managed IT services is the choice of the future.

Traditional IT Support

First, let’s consider traditional IT support. Most of the time includes a local IT team. This type of support is sometimes called “break-fix” support. You require support when something is breaking or working incorrectly. Your local IT staff might also not be available 24*7, and their skills can become outdated compared to other certified IT experts from tech companies.

For some small businesses, you may decide to invest and build an in-house team to set up, monitor, and manage your IT system. Or traditional IT support can also be outsourced to other IT companies. They may provide you some IT guidance and outsourced IT staff who can stay at the client site.

However, the key nature of traditional IT is reactive, which can become a weakness in this era of rapid technological advancement. Your original IT system and infrastructure are likely not built to adapt quickly to your business’s advance. The system is not ready for scalability and high availability demands since investing and scaling a traditional system can be time-consuming and expensive. Your growth demand can outgrow existing IT ability.

Traditional IT support solves many problems, however, if your business is growing in complexity, a traditional IT support model may be a good choice. But, it may be a good choice if you have a complex, customized application base that is not subject to frequent upgrades; or if your applications don’t require specialized skill sets and regular training to maintain.

Having said that, technology affects every business. Organizations have been increasingly utilizing technology to build and maintain their advantages in the current competitive market. That’s why Managed Services grows to be one attractive approach.

Managed IT Services

Managed IT Services are services provided by a third party to care for all your IT needs. IT services from trustworthy providers offer different services including but not limited to operational support, asset management, patch management, anti-virus, backup, replication, monitoring, and reporting.

One of the main differences between a managed IT service support and a traditional IT support is that the former provides you expert support with coverage options from regular business hours to 24×7. The providers can help you to build a scalable and adaptive model. Thus, instead of a reactive and passive approach, the team from managed services provider actively prepares and develops a system that can handle disruptions, new demands.

In this model, your business’s powerline relies on IT services. For example, with I-Net Dynamics’  IT management expertise, you can focus on the one thing that matters the most: running your business.

Some Key Features and Benefits of Managed Services

As shared in some previous articles, Managed IT Services provided by certified and reliable providers bring some undeniable benefits:

 

• Priority Focus: choosing to delegate IT services, you do not have to worry about and invest heavily to meet the crucial needs in many aspects, for example, monitoring, analysis, security, and performance. Your resources are allocated to your business.

 

• A single point of contact for a wide range of professional services: Working with a competent service provider should give you better peace of mind. We can perform throughout the IT assessment of your current physical and virtual IT infrastructures. Based on it, we can identify weaknesses and points for improvement, and next, a more strategic IT plan might be created combining various services such as backup services, anti-virus, replication, monitoring, and reporting.

 

Rather than staying in a reactive mode and wasting more money on hiring contractors when outages or issues occur,  certified providers like I-Net Dynamics are committed to providing reliable, responsible, and timely support, monitoring, maintenance, and reporting of your IT system.

 

• Cost Efficiency: With expert IT engineers, we can assist in evaluating and developing a strategic IT plan for your business as well as prepare for your growth. You then have more predictable IT plans with manageable costs since service providers should inform their costs.

 

You no longer have to invest heavily in your research and development of an in-house IT solution. For a similar level of IT system, services generally come at a better price. Moreover, some other kinds of costs, such as hiring and training IT experts, are handled by managed IT services providers. You have access to top-tier certified IT experts at much lower costs.

 

• High Availability with Constant Monitoring and Support: 24/7 monitoring is available to ensure your business productivity and minimize all potential downtime. Through proactive monitoring and maintenance, IT systems are more resilient; as a result, your business productivity and reliability are enhanced.

 

• High Scalability and Readiness for Growth: Managed IT services are also easier to scale to meet your growth needs. Managed IT services providers can carry out an assessment about newer demands and then scale to achieve these goals. In these scenarios, a faster solution is also provided without a long time for R&D and then deployment from your side. The big part is now absorbed and fulfilled by the provider.

 

• Security and Risk Management: apart from general operational tasks, services, including anti-virus, backup, and replication, are available to make your business disaster-proof as much as possible. Even in the cases of outages or downtimes, you can be confident that an appropriate action plan will be performed to protect your data and business.

 

Furthermore, in many countries, your IT system might have to meet several security compliance requirements, these demands are better left for the experts. IT providers like I-NET consist of professionals always stay up-to-date with the advancement of technologies. Our staff is well-trained in the provided services and newer releases of them to ensure your system is well-managed.

 

Overall, managed services are a practical and effective solution for many businesses. Apart from the mentioned benefits, some points should be noted that to utilize any products and services, you should consider providers with a good track of records, then, contact and work closely with them for an initial assessment. If you are interested in a local and reliable provider, please contact us here.