When you’re running a small business, it often feels like you have to make a series of decisions related to outsourcing versus in-house solutions. Areas such as payroll and other bookkeeping tasks are often the first areas of expertise that businesses outsource, but when you invite an IT partner to help you solve some technology challenges, you may wish you had started there.
When you think about the far-reaching influence IT has over your business processes and success, you can see that uninterrupted reliability and quality performance are essential. Consider just a glimpse of how technology supports your business functions: your customers find you via an online search; they examine your website to see if you’ll meet their needs, their orders are placed on your software; and your accounts receivable program handles their payment.
Investing in an IT partner comes with three clear benefits for supporting your business technology:
Planning and Strategy: You have a strategy to guide your business, but you also need an IT strategy. Having an IT partner can help you map a technology growth path that fits well with your size and the trajectory of your organization. They can also provide insight into solutions or new approaches that you may otherwise never hear about.
This benefit helps ensure your technology strategy is aligned well with your business operations and supports your business goals. For instance, if your sales team wants to implement a cloud-based customer relationship management solution, your IT partner will help ensure your network and other infrastructure elements are adequately prepared for handling a new digital solution.
When determining whether this is a good fit for your organization, think about it in terms of cyber security. If your small business were the victim of an attack, you might struggle to recover if you didn’t have a solid disaster recovery plan in place.
In their latest Data Breach Investigation Report, Verizon notes that 43% of all breaches victimized small- to medium-size businesses. Even if you could recover your data and cover the damages, you may not be able to withstand the downtime that comes with a cyber attack. An IT partner can help you address vulnerabilities and create a disaster recovery strategy.
Affordability and Scalability: An IT partner will likely provide better hardware and software than what you could afford on your own and at a better price. In addition, when it’s time to add on users or when it’s time to upgrade, these changes happen seamlessly.
When it’s time to migrate to a new cloud solution, an IT partner takes the daily headache away from the business owners and allows the transition to occur behind the scenes while business goes on as usual. Updates and maintenance are part of the subscription-based invoicing so there’s never any surprise on your bill, and you’ll find that updates never interrupt your business processes.
Support and Reliability: You’re far past the time when it was considered acceptable for a business’s website to be down for hours or days. Customers are fully aware that if you’re not prepared to accept their money, your competitors will be all too willing. When you work with an IT partner, you receive 24/7 support, and IT is always on hand if there’s an interruption to any device or solution.
When it’s time to consider an expansion of your IT department or when you determine that you need a more strategic approach to your infrastructure, consider an IT partner. Contact us at Access Tech to learn more about the benefits that outsourcing this expertise can offer.
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