“If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”
Of all the clichés businesses have adopted over the years, this one stands out – in a bad way, aging poorly as technology demands more proactive attention by the day.
While the underlying purpose is saving money, the repercussions are the opposite.
Due to technology’s significant role in all aspects of business operations and its rapidly changing nature, this reactive approach is doing more harm than good to businesses nationwide. Instead of waiting for IT problems to arise and then inserting a solution, businesses must shift to a proactive approach to technology.
Why Break/Fix IT Is Declining
In the past, waiting for something to break was a way for small businesses to save money on technology solutions. In addition to cost savings, the break/fix method provided companies flexibility with no long-term commitment to an IT service provider.
The break/fix method was successful for businesses because past technology was more expensive, less integrated across businesses, and posed fewer security risks than modern-day solutions.
Technology is now interconnected throughout businesses, making companies more dependent on it and causing the old way of managing IT to cripple businesses. Here are some of the top ways businesses are falling behind by relying on break/fix IT management:
Security Concerns
Outdated hardware and software become increasingly vulnerable to increasingly advanced cyberattacks that can put a company out of business within weeks. While it’s tempting to think cyber threats only apply to large corporations, the truth is that over 60% of small businesses experience cyberattacks every year.
Permanent or Long-lasting Damage
Without expert oversight managing the technology, businesses often encounter difficult situations where the solution is broken beyond repair or requires significant fixes. Depending on the severity of the issue, it’s not uncommon for this to result in companies having decreased operational capacity or even shutting down while resolving issues.
Recurring Issues
Businesses that don’t proactively monitor their IT solutions will face recurring and repetitive issues. Without a Managed Service Provider (MSP), minor issues are overlooked as trivial and lead to more significant problems over and over again.
Decreased Employee Satisfaction
Using inefficient and outdated technology leads to frustrated teams and decreased employee satisfaction. When a backlog of submitted requests to fix an IT issue occurs, employees take shortcuts and lose trust in company leadership to run the business effectively.
Decreased Competitiveness
As technology increases businesses’ abilities to be more efficient and profitable, the need for expert IT management is also increasing. Businesses that aren’t utilizing MSPs to oversee their technology risk spending more money, only to fall behind the competition in meeting customer and business needs.
Waiting for something to break before calling the “IT guy” costs businesses massive amounts of money and time. In addition, lost opportunities, reduced productivity, and lack of future thinking are commonplace when companies don’t partner with an MSP.
Benefits of Managed Service Providers
When choosing to partner with a Managed Service Provider, businesses experience an immediate improvement on the day-to-day upkeep of IT solutions to help minimize the risk of failures and downtime.
That said, working with an MSP goes far beyond preventing and fixing emergencies when they happen. Companies can expect a long-term, cost-effective approach to managing IT solutions. MSPs provide businesses the opportunity to ramp up productivity, increase profitability, and deliver better customer experiences by leveraging their technology to its fullest.
Increased Security and Compliance
MSPs secure and streamline a business’ IT solutions, ensuring compliance and security across all aspects of the business. From technology solutions to employee awareness and training, today’s technology landscape requires a proactive approach to IT security.
Fixed-costs
Working with an MSP provides companies with a guaranteed cost for agreed-upon services. In the long run, this cost structure is more cost-effective than only addressing issues when they occur.
Proactive Monitoring
With constant monitoring of your IT infrastructure, issues are either prevented completely or detected immediately and dealt with prior to becoming a large issue. This saves companies time and money by reducing downtime and ensuring businesses have the capability to meet customer needs.
Company Familiarity
Partnering with an MSP means they know your business goals and provide strategic consistency over the duration of the partnership. Businesses will be able to rely on the consistency of one partnership rather than depending on patchwork IT band-aids from one-off hires to fix an issue.
Making the Switch
Before making the change to an MSP, companies should identify and define IT needs to identify the best fit for their company.
While there are multiple considerations when choosing the right IT service provider, one of the most important is an in-depth IT discovery to ensure they know exactly what your business needs. Otherwise, they’re simply guessing at best, and you’ll end up in another problematic position sooner or later.
Ensuring the MSP has experience providing support for your technology stack and understands your industry is a must. From there, businesses need to consider financial costs and communicate changes to staff to ensure that needs and expectations are met. Don’t worry, we’ll talk more about this in a future article.
How are you managing your IT? What are your concerns about partnering with an IT services provider?