Would You Rather Trust Something That Repeatedly Breaks, Or Something That’s Managed?

When you are looking for help with your IT maintenance, would you rather experience downtime and frustration, or would you rather not? While the right answer to this question is clear, many organizations still rely on antiquated break-fix IT support that holds them back from achieving greatness. What are the differences between traditional break-fix IT support and a managed service provider?

When you are looking for help with your IT maintenance, would you rather experience downtime and frustration, or would you rather not? While the right answer to this question is clear, many organizations still rely on antiquated break-fix IT support that holds them back from achieving greatness. What are the differences between traditional break-fix IT support and a managed service provider?

Let’s take a focused look at a certain issue, as well as how both break-fix IT and managed IT services approach it.

Break-Fix IT
A break-fix IT strategy focused on being more reactive than proactive. Basically, you only maintain your systems when they are already experiencing problems. This generally includes a technician arriving on-site to resolve the issue. Unfortunately, this method of maintaining your business’s technology isn’t sustainable, and you’ll soon realize that the downtime suffered from such a practice could be crippling in the long run.

Technology helps your business move at incredibly high speeds. Without it, you’ll be forced to slog through the mud when even a single part of your hardware infrastructure breaks down. If the hardware is required by your employees to perform their duties, you could wind up with not just a single employee being incapable of working, but multiple workers, all of whom are wasting time and money.

You have to take into account numerous factors when determining the true cost of break-fix IT services. The travel time to the office, the time spent by the technician on-site, how many employees aren’t capable of working, and the expense of purchasing new hardware. Furthermore, if they aren’t able to make the repairs with the parts they have on-hand, you’ll have to wait until the parts are ordered and delivered, further increasing just about all aspects of break-fix IT. The end result is your organization being unable to perform as intended for at least some duration of time, which also decreased profit and cash flow. Simply put, the more economical choice is managed IT services.

Managed IT Services
Just like break-fix IT, there’s a certain history to managed IT services. This development came about as a result of the shortcomings of break-fix IT--rather than waiting for problems to occur so they could be resolved, someone out there thought it would be better to prevent the problems from happening in the first place, therefore eliminating the need for them to be resolved. At its most optimal, managed IT proactively monitors your network to resolve minor issues before they can cause operational problems.

This leads to a predictable monthly rate to cover any issues that crop up remotely, which keeps your business from suffering due to downtime. Since most problems can be resolved remotely, it’s likely that you won’t even notice the problems in the first place, since they can be detected and resolved so quickly. Compared to the sporadic and volatile price range for break-fix IT, a monthly payment that covers your service level agreement is a much more appealing (and manageable) investment.

To learn more about managed IT services, reach out to Computerware at (703) 821-8200.