Outsourcing IT support

These days, IT isn’t quite the same black art it used to be - business owners were often under the impression that IT was so complex that they would need to employ a full time member of staff to look after it. This doesn’t need to be the case today.

A typical small to medium-sized business would historically have employed a dedicated IT person who would be responsible for looking after complex server set-ups, software updates and general day-to-day issues. Businesses would rely solely on this individual, which in itself would be a dangerous thing to do.

However, now that technology has become more mainstream and readily available, and providing that your IT systems are set up right in the first place, you can quite conceivably outsource your on-going IT support needs without always needing costly in-house IT staff.

As well as the obvious cost savings, outsourcing to an external IT partner will enable you to benefit from a wealth of skills and specialist experience. And crucially, in these difficult economic times, you won’t have to worry about what will happen if your in-house IT employee is off sick, or any of the other employee-related issues such as pay rises and redundancies.

Your IT provider should provide you with service level agreements and guaranteed response times, so you will have the peace of mind that somebody is always available to look after you.

In addition a good IT support partner should also provide you with excellent customer service (both when things are going well and when they do go wrong!), be able to speak simply and plainly to clients without baffling people with ‘tech speak’ and use simple and flexible billing methods allowing you to budget IT costs over a period.

Companies that outsource their IT can be wide and varied and can include large companies that are spread over multiple sites, or have complex systems that require 24/7 support. There are those that have little in-house IT resource or are struggling to support their existing IT infrastructure and sadly, in the current climate, those that need to reduce operating costs and do not want the overhead of IT experts.

Despite outsourcing being the preferred option for many businesses, it may not always be the best option. In some cases, companies need an instant onsite response and dedicated skills in areas such as bespoke software maintenance, in which case a hybrid model of both employed staff and outsourcing could be used.

Another option that is developing at a dramatic pace is cloud computing – an area of technology that is set to revolutionise the way we run our IT.

In its simplest form, ‘Cloud Computing’ means accessing your IT services and systems through the internet. In the future, you will simply open up a web browser and be faced with your desktop which can be accessed from almost any location through many devices, providing you have 3G coverage. All the business IT systems and data is hosted at a data centre somewhere and the need for in-house IT support will diminish still further.

However be warned, you will need to have an excellent internet connection with a service level agreement in place and you will also need to ensure your data is held at a secure location. If you run complex resource hungry software such as AutoCad, then the ‘cloud’ may not work for you.

Finally, you need to consider backup & disaster recovery; how do you know your data is safe? Are your backups happening as they should be? Does your data get stored offsite as well as onsite and how quickly can your business be back up and running in the event of a server failure or disaster? Orchid can deliver a business continuity solution that will give you a maximum downtime of 20 to 30 minutes and doesn’t cost the earth to implement. If you are still using tape then you should seriously review your backup procedures.

Reviewing your IT infrastructure and the way that it is supported should form an integral part of your business strategy. Technology is about business benefits and should be a way of leveraging more business for your company - make sure that your business maximises its potential.

If you would like to discuss any of these subjects in more detail please call Mark Dryden at Orchid IT who will be happy to help, or feel free to visit our website: www.orchidit.com