As your business grows, its needs will undoubtedly change. You’ll need more employees, more resources, new ways of marketing, and more equipment. Much of that equipment will likely be technology-based equipment, such as computers and external storage devices. As your technology network grows in your office, it will become more complex and more difficult to manage. How do you know when it’s the right time to start looking for IT managed service providers in Orlando, FL? Keep reading to find out.
You Need More Continuous Support
Having a single IT guy in the office might sound like it would provide you with ongoing, continuous support for your IT needs. After all, if he’s in the office, he’s at your disposal and always able to help, right? Unfortunately, as businesses grow, properly scaling an in-house IT team can be extremely difficult. Scale up too quickly, and your IT guys are getting paid for hours when they’re waiting for a help ticket to come through. Scale too slowly (the much more common and likely issue), and you’re left without the IT help you need when you need it.
If this is happening to you, a managed service provider (MSP) is the best solution. MSPs are staffed around the clock to provide you with support whenever you need it. It doesn’t matter if it’s the first IT problem of the day or the fiftieth—MSPs have IT professionals available continuously.
You Need More Breadth of IT Expertise
A single IT expert can be extremely good at their job, but they will never have the same breadth of IT experience and knowledge as an entire team of IT experts. When you work with an MSP, you gain access to their full team and the collective knowledge that they hold. Have a new piece of technology you’re looking to roll out? They probably have someone on their team that’s already familiar with it and can help you out. Experiencing issues with the new software? Someone on the MSP team likely already has extensive experience in fixing that issue. If you need to be able to get answers to all your IT questions quickly, an MSP can provide a greater breadth of IT knowledge so that you can get those answers as fast as possible.
You Need More Services without a Huge Budget
Many small-business owners are surprised to learn that hiring an MSP does not require as big of a budget as they assumed it would. Hiring an MSP can avoid the continuing costs of hiring full-time employees, such as salaries, benefits, increased business insurance costs, and more. MSPs can provide a much wider range of IT services—including data backup, disaster recovery plans, proactive network security management, and more—for a reasonable price, giving you more services for less money than a full-sized, full-time IT team of your own.
You Need to Improve Your Network Security
As your business grows, data security becomes more and more important. You’ll be handling payment information from more customers and clients, housing classified business information that competitors might seek to steal, and simply handling a lot more data on your servers overall. If you’re concerned that your current data security efforts aren’t enough protection, MSP can help.
We take a more proactive approach to network security than a simple IT helpdesk might do. We regularly test your network to find weak points in the security so that we can shore it up against any potential attacks. We also help manage regular data backups to ensure that your servers are damaged, deleted, corrupted, or destroyed. Your information is safely housed at an external location and can be restored quickly. This hands-on approach to network security provides you with better protection and peace of mind that your data won’t be lost to hackers, viruses, or even natural disasters.
You Need to Improve Your Network Uptimes
Having your business network go down can bring productivity to a screeching halt—and that’s just bad for business. Unfortunately, many in-house IT teams are overworked and stretched too thin to be able to maintain the network proactively. Performing routine maintenance on a business network is just as essential as it is for your car; the more you neglect that maintenance, the more likely you are to experience these downtimes that cost your business money.
An MSP for small business in Orlando, FL, can more actively maintain your system, performing system updates and other regular improvements that keep things running smoothly. This helps to avoid those downtimes in the first place, but if they do happen, an MSP can also help get things back online more quickly. If you’re ready to hire an MSP for your small business, contact Millennium Technology Group today.