When your company is looking at getting IT Services… You first must understand what main types of services you can purchase or subscribe to. There's three ways and each has a bit of a definition. These terms come from the IT industry so we can explain it to you in detail to not miss out on any option.
The Three Types of IT Services:
The first option is “in house.” This means you as an owner or CEO have gone out and you've hired a full-time staff member to manage IT. They work for you full time and they're part of your payroll. This option is straight forward. This staff member or small team of staff would be responsible for everything in your office environment and you would not outsource any of those services.
The second option that most people are familiar with is called “break fix.” You might have an IP provider, but you don't necessarily have any contract with them you call them when something's broken or not working. They charge you an hourly fee.
The last way is what we call ourselves at Skycomp Solutions a “managed service provider” or MSP. This is where you have a set contracted fee or monthly payment. It's like hiring a staff but you're hiring a team from another building to manage your IT. All your team can call the MSP directly for help. There shouldn't be any extra labor charges, no extra charges for on-site visits and remote support. You should also get some sort of antivirus and backups included. All those solutions that you don't want to think about day to day. Think of it as outsourcing all of your IT needs. Skycomp of course is a big believer in this type of service.
What They Don’t Tell You about “Break Fix”
The downside of having a break-fix solution from an IT perspective is if you're not doing a lot of the preventive maintenance. You will run into a lot of problems. If you're only calling them when there's a problem and then they're trying to put that fire out and get you back up and running again. This can cause a feeling of not moving forward. If you are not putting in preventative measures, antivirus and backups and just fixing things when they break. Your security, hardware, and business are at risk of a technical collapse and you might be spending money where you don't need to.
Why the MSP Might be a Better Option:
Comparing Break Fix to a MSP shows big advantages. You get a full complement of staff from all skill levels. You get some tier-1, tier-2 and tier-3. Where if you're going to do it yourself or hire an IT specific employee. It might be hard to find that one staff member that has all the talent or if you find that one very talented staff member you're going to have to pay them a lot. When a lot of times you're having them do simple password resets or a program install. Having somebody on your staff that's going to be there may also need to go on vacation at some point. During that time you don't have anybody for IT support. So then you might need to hire a couple people so when you get to that stage you don't have to worry.
This is when a Managed service provider becomes very attractive you're going to pay a similar cost to an inexpensive employee and with that it will come with an entire team, 24/7 support, all the software and tools to give you a worry free technology experience. That's the difference between the different types of IT Services.
You might be asking yourself… which one is right for me?
There's no one-size-fits-all answer to that. It really depends on your business. How's your business runs day to day and how much you rely on technology. If you're a large business you most likely have well over a hundred employees using computers. That might be a level to consider having your own IT staff. Take into account you have to know and have your management team, know how they manage the IT staff. So there's more to just hiring a person. It would be good to have them be aligned with your business goals. But when you start to get to that size it maybe actually less expensive for you to have those people part of your staff.
If you're a smaller business or technology isn't the driver for your business, then break-fix may be a good option. For example, if you have a computer that's down but it doesn't really affect your production and it's not very impactful to your day-to-day operations. Then you might be able to get away without having a proactive solution and a break-fix solution might work for you.
A word of caution against the break fix style service. In the cyber security world regular bad actors are constantly trying to hack business accounts and find passwords and exploits in machines. Generally, with a break-fix set up you're not paying for extra maintenance to make sure any viruses get found and resolved. On top of that, Windows updates might not be covered under a break fix solution. Some updates that get overlooked are third-party applications such as Adobe, Java, Google Chrome, just to name a few. These types of apps don't get picked up by Windows update automatically and could cause problems down the line for your devices.
Outsourcing your IT to a company generally has processes and monitoring on all your machines. The goal is to avoid having clients calling for tech trouble or support tickets. They want to solve the problem ahead of time to help optimize their time and support for their clients. Technology is better for most people when it just runs and is secure and you don't have to call someone to fix it.
We hoped you learned something from this about what type of service you should go with. Skycomp would be happy to help you decide as well as give you more reasources to guide you in your selection process. Checkout the video playlist on this topic here.