Small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) have to be experts at keeping plates spinning with limited resources. With some SMBs as small as three or four people, they need to be able to perform all of their duties in the most efficient way possible. The trouble is, most businesses want to focus primarily on their core business objectives – these are the tasks, workloads, and pursuits that lead to them making money, gaining customers, or making valuable partnerships. But there are always other tasks and objectives that must be completed – tasks like admin, or IT maintenance. They may seem low value, or of little importance, but not performing those tasks will have a major effect on the performance and efficiency of an SMB.
A popular solution for SMBs these days is to outsource some areas of their business to a third-party outsourcing partner. One of the most popular forms of outsourcing with SMBs is managed services. We spoke to a professional managed IT services company London SMBs have been partnering with for over a decade. TechQuarters, who are based primarily in South London, has demonstrated to their customers the importance of IT, and how much an SMB has to gain from outsourcing to a managed service provider.
What are Managed Services?
Managed services encompass a wide range of IT services. Generally, managed services implement remote monitoring and management, in order for them to be able to manage a business’s IT infrastructure without actually being onsite. What is more, managed service providers usually have a number of partnerships with both hardware and software vendors, which enables them to provide their customers with technology, as well as help them manage them.
But in what ways does manage services benefit small to medium-sized businesses?
SMBs Can Focus On Core Objectives
As stated above, a successful business is one that is able to put its best resources into core objectives, without letting any other areas of the business fall behind. With technology becoming more and more essential to business, many areas of an organization incorporate technology, and so partnering with a managed service provider can help you manage multiple areas of the business more easily, through the technology that they can provide you.
In doing so, you can allocate more of your time and energy to core objectives to further your business.
SMBs Can Get Enterprise-level It Support
One of the major components of managed services is IT support – it is such a big component that people often think outsourced IT support and managed services are interchangeable terms. This is not accurate, however, as managed services offer a range of additional services.
But, the IT support you can get from a managed service provider is generally of a very high level. Consider the fact that managed service providers have the money and resources to hire and train top talent, and invest in their career development. Moreover, they have much more hardware and software resources at their disposal. All of this together creates a picture of top-quality IT support that far outstrips the support an SMB could hope to have by hiring their own IT department (which, due to budget constraints, may only be one or two people).
SMBs Can Reduce Business Risk
Small to medium-sized businesses are generally more vulnerable to risk by the simple virtue of them being smaller, having more limited resources, and therefore having more difficulty weathering changes, or adapting to them. Anything from regulatory compliance, to the emergence of new competitors, or any rapid change to the market or audience trends, can lead to risks being created for an SMB.
For an SMB to be able to mitigate risk, they need to develop an agile and resilient framework for their business. The easiest way for them to do this is to partner with a managed service provider. Business agility is a highly desirable quality for any organization, and the current advancements and trends in information technology lend themselves to creating business agility – solutions like Cloud Computing can easily be acquired and set up with the help of a managed service provider, and they will help an SMB deploy solutions that will help them become more adaptive and resilient.
SMBs Can Make Their Costs More Efficient
One of the biggest benefits of managed services is the cost benefits. Technology is very crucial to modern business, so there is no way around implementing it, no matter what your business is. Sometimes, it can feel risky to implement new technology, when it might be replaced with something better in a matter of years. But managed service providers can help you implement new technologies in a way that provides both long and short term cost savings – a good example is the implementation of Cloud Computing in an organization; not only does it eliminate the need for physical servers (a significant cost), but it is also a very flexible and future-proof solution, meaning it won’t need to be replaced for a long time – what is more, Cloud Services are usually maintained by the service provider. This is just one example of the ways in which managed service providers can implement technologies to save you money.
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