Managed IT support moves your IT support to a third-party, specialised company in exchange for a set or flexible monthly fee. Trained IT technicians can provide support to your employees via phone, email, or through special desktop remote control software (such as TeamViewer).
It's a great way to provide tech support if you can't offer software and staff feedback in-house, either due to expense, space, or a lack of staff with the relevant skills. However, managed IT also provides many other benefits to companies. Here are our top five.
1) Out Of Hours Support
Even the best employees can't keep going 24-7. By offering rotating shifts and longer 'open' hours for support outside of the traditional 9 AM - 5:30 PM business model, a managed IT helpdesk can keep running even after you close your doors. If you rely on remote and flexible working, this can be a much more effective way to provide support when your staff need it. It also allows you to scale and prioritise support to critical hours and days.
2) Focused Expertise
Often, on-site IT staff are generalists - good at solving day-to-day issues, but less adept at providing specific, niche fixes and in-depth knowledge of certain software packages. Managed IT allows for a diverse, dedicated team of specialists to be fielded from across a company better adapted to solving tricky IT problems beyond the scope of routine issues.
3) More Free Time
Paying for external, managed IT support can liberate your on-site employees to spend their time more productively or focus on resolving customer support and hardware issues alone. By compartmentalising technical support, you'll save money and time. Your trained staff will be able to put their IT skills to use directly, optimising your business instead of just firefighting technical issues to keep it afloat.
4) Faster, Focused Problem Resolution
If you're running a small team of IT staff on-site, it can take more time than it should to fix everything as outstanding work piles up. A first-come, first-served system also means that urgent tasks can take longer than they should to complete, too.
Switching to an external ticket system can help to fix this. Managed IT desks can deploy remote staff faster to resolve small, routine problems as they're reported by users. For more significant issues, ticketing allows a co-ordinated group effort to break down server and software glitches and resolve them, step-by-step.
5) Monitoring and Proactive Maintenance
One other service managed IT can offer is network and machine condition surveillance. IT technicians don't have the time to keep an eye on key systems constantly - they perform spot-check maintenance and can often miss developing faults and hack intrusions.
Remote managed IT surveillance uses the same rotating shifts model to check up on your company's infrastructure much more frequently. It also allows for routine maintenance to be remotely scheduled, adding layers of protection, as well as saving you time and money.
Managed IT Support from TMB
If you need reliable, affordable, expert IT support at a distance, call or email TMB today. Our trained engineers specialise in business-to-business IT repairs, maintenance, and streamlining. Drop us a line today to find out more about what we could do for you.
Image source - Pixabay