Top 7 benefits of IT outsourcing

A growing number of companies have turned to IT outsourcing to help manage new and emerging challenges — and they are discovering significant business advantages.

In this article, we explore seven of the biggest benefits of outsourcing IT, and how it can empower your business strategy.

1. Control IT Costs

Many businesses invest heavily in IT, but don’t always know if they have everything they need — or if they really need everything they’re paying for. IT outsourcing offers a more efficient way to manage IT costs: Pay only for what you need, when you need it, at a fixed monthly cost.

When your requirements change, you can plan in advance, knowing exactly what the variable costs will be. If, for example, your IT infrastructure needs an overhaul, you can anticipate needing more IT support during the transition. Simply add this to your plan by the month.

With a provider that bundles IT support services, hardware and software, you can get a better value and potentially see IT cost reductions, since the cost per service is often lower.

2. Improve Scalability

When your business is ready to move forward, your IT should never hold you back.

IT outsourcing allows you to adapt to change with agility and scale up quickly. Anytime you need to add new users or functionality, or improve your network’s speed and reliability, you can do so easily. The guidance and expertise of managed IT support is just a call or email away.

By eliminating the time and difficulties of in-house implementation, training and management, you can start using and benefitting from new technologies sooner. Enhancements like automated and secured information backup or scan-to-email can transform your organization’s efficiency and productivity, streamlining your business for accelerated growth.

3. Become More Competitive

Outsourced IT services give you access to enterprise-level technology and expertise, adapted to your organization’s needs. This empowers your business to compete with large companies by giving you similar tools and talent.

This includes data management expertise to help you tap into big data — and reap the benefits of data-driven strategy. As data grows increasingly complex, more companies are opting for managed IT support to unlock its value, make more informed decisions, and compete more effectively.

IT outsourcing can also make your business more competitive by freeing up time for you and your staff to focus on what matters: growing and developing your business. A knowledgeable and dependable IT helpdesk support team is there to manage any software, hardware or user issues.

4. Upgrade Your Tech Support

Many companies struggle with a backlog of IT requests, especially with the increase in remote end users. This puts a strain on internal IT staff, diverting time and attention that could be focused on core business functions, strategy and innovation.

IT outsourcing gives your employees access to highly trained, experienced and certified IT support, during and outside regular business hours, with the same level of responsiveness that large companies receive. You can also fortify your IT environment with IT infrastructure support to help ensure ongoing system performance and reliability around the clock.

IT outsourcing also helps keep remote workers productive and engaged. It not only gives them next-level tech support, but also secured 24/7 access to apps and data, and the latest technology with current security standards. If you need more server capacity to accommodate them, your provider can help with that as well.

5. Optimize Your Team

In addition to relieving your IT team of the demands of day-to-day IT support, IT outsourcing can help free all of your employees from menial tasks. A managed IT support partner can provide guidance on IT infrastructure solutions, including hardware, software and services for automating many routine processes.

Giving your employees more time to focus on work that is more gratifying and better aligned with their core expertise can deliver a meaningful morale boost and help retain talent.

Talent retention enables your business to gain more from its current talent investments, and avoid future ones. Recruiting, hiring, onboarding and training are long and costly processes. It is far more cost effective to optimize the contributions of existing team members who know your business and are motivated to support its goals. Outsourced IT services can help.

6. Minimize Downtime

Business continuity depends on a reliable, secured IT infrastructure. Natural or public health disasters, cyberattacks, and site or equipment failures all pose risks. Even seemingly minor oversights like expired software licenses, mismanaged devices, and users on unsecured networks compromise security and compliance.

Substantive IT preparedness has become essential — and IT outsourcing offers proactive solutions. Expert IT professionals can help arm you with a defined backup strategy with optional disaster recovery planning to keep downtime to a minimum.

Assessing your current preparedness is an important first step. Managed IT support services often include IT infrastructure inventory management and standardization to improve security, connectivity, collaboration, and speed of remediation. Reliable monitoring and redundant systems provide added layers of assurance.

You can also opt for 24/7 IT support or other plans to put IT manpower in place for incident response. Your outsourced IT support team can address cyber incidents, delivering faster response times, user setup, and remediation — all while your internal staff maintains normal business operations without disruption.

7. Protect Your Business with IT Outsourcing

Cybersecurity risks are ever-present, and threats such as malware, ransomware, DDoS and other types of attack are growing more sophisticated. At the same time, rapid change in industry competition, government regulations, economic conditions and technologies expose businesses to risk.

The high cost of doing nothing, or not enough, underscores the need for reliable information security.

A trusted IT outsourcing company can identify your organization’s vulnerabilities and help you establish safeguards. Enacting consistent security practices, setting up automatic backups to an off-site data center and network monitoring all serve to mitigate threats. A proactive approach is best, and a third-party IT support provider allows you to offload some infrastructural risk.

Outsourced IT services put expert industry knowledge on your side, improving security as well as ongoing system performance. This in turn allows you to become more flexible, agile, and dynamic as an organization, and ultimately deliver greater customer satisfaction and compete more successfully.

Source : https://www.ricoh-usa.com/en/insights/articles/top-7-benefits-of-it-outsourcing