Managed IT Protects Your Business And Your Budget

When it comes to maintaining and managing technology properly, larger businesses traditionally have the advantage over small-and-medium-sized ones, as they have greater financial resources. In fact, many small businesses will postpone these activities to help preserve the flexibility in their budget. What these businesses need is a way to leverage the benefits of proactive IT maintenance without breaking the bank.

Small businesses face considerable difficulties when trying to maintain their IT. First of all, since they generally have fewer employees, the workload is heavier for each resource. This leads to IT management being postponed in favor of other, seemingly more important concerns. However, this strategy accomplishes little more than putting the company in a more precarious position. Exacerbating the problem is the fact that hiring the personnel that could help you better manage your IT is often prohibitively expensive.

If neither option is practical, business in this position should turn to option three: managed IT services.

Managed services are a much different approach than what many would perceive as the typical IT service process, referred to as break/fix. Let’s say one of your pieces of hardware isn’t operating correctly. Once you report the issue to your IT provider, they dispatch someone to your location to resolve the problem, and you’re left on the hook paying a bill for that one specific call. You lose the capital, but also the potential revenue from the downtime you have experienced. This reactive approach therefore is quite a bit costlier than the increasingly more popular managed service model, which takes a proactive stance against technology issues.

At Computerware, we follow this proactive approach, monitoring your solutions remotely so that we can prevent issues from influencing your business, especially before they turn into bigger problems. For instance, under our managed service agreement, we will keep an eye on your infrastructure for any warning of hardware failure so you have an opportunity to replace that hardware before it can have a negative impact on your business.

If this option sounds more expensive than the break/fix approach, consider this: if you combine the loss in revenue that downtime from the broken equipment lead to and the cost of replacing or repairing the broken technology, you are out a significant amount of usable capital.

Compare that to managed services where there’s a chance that your problem could be resolved remotely--leading to a smaller service fee when compared to the cost of hardware replacement--it makes a lot of sense to see what kind of value Computerware’s certified technicians can bring you.

Depending on what is included in your service level agreement, the expenses associated with managed services will essentially always be less than the costs that of break/fix. Computerware can help you to make these changes in your own company, making operations both more reliable and less expensive in the process. To learn more about what managed IT services can do for you, give us a call at (703) 821-8200.