How To Decide If Outsourcing Your IT Is Right For Your Business

With many small and medium-sized businesses increasingly using managed IT services, how do you know if it’s the right choice for your organization?

Before you can make that decision, you’ll need to figure out what your current IT concerns are and how they align with your long-term business plan.

This self-assessment can help you see exactly where and how you could benefit from partnering with a managed IT services provider (MSP).

In this article, we’ll discuss some key factors businesses like yours should take into account to help decide if managed IT is the right solution. We’ll explore the true ROI of managed IT services versus a do-it-yourself approach.

After reading this article, you’ll be able to evaluate your IT needs and decide whether IT outsourcing will work for your business. 

Besides Cost, What Factors Should I Use To Decide If I Should Use Managed IT Services?

When trying to decide if you should outsource your IT, there are several factors to consider.

You’ll need to take a close look at your IT environment, including your in-house IT personnel, your existing cybersecurity measures, and the age of your technology.

5 factors to consider:

1. Managing & maintaining staff

Staffing is one of the main considerations for businesses when deciding on outsourcing their IT.

When it comes to hiring expert IT staff, you need to cast a wide net to find the right talent. With the ongoing shortage of IT and cybersecurity professionals and increased demand for such talent, that can prove to be easier said than done.

Related Article: How The Cybersecurity Staffing Shortage Can Put Your Business At Risk

As a small and medium-sized business owner, a good chunk of your time will be spent interviewing, hiring, and possibly supervising IT staff.

If you don’t already have an internal IT team, and if you don’t have an IT background yourself, how do you properly evaluate the skills and qualifications of potential hires?

You will need a way to assess their proficiency in addressing your present and future IT needs. So, you might have to hire IT managers who can ensure that the engineers and service technicians you bring on board are following industry best practices and that the tools they are implementing meet compliance standards.

In short, you’ll need to have the competencies, time, and resources available to maintain enough IT staff to keep your business humming.

2. vCIO services

A vCIO is an integral part of managed IT support, offering executive-level, strategic IT planning and budgeting guidance to align your IT challenges and long-term business goals.

A vCIO also helps strengthen the relationship between businesses and their MSPs by offering personable and responsive communication to clients.

Related Article: Gain A Competitive Edge: Strategic vCIO And TAM Support in Managed IT

The vCIO also provides transparency through regular status updates and quarterly business reviews (QBRs).

That being said, you’ll need to figure out if it makes financial and business sense to hire an IT professional internally to take on the many responsibilities of this position, or if it would make more sense to use an MSP offering vCIO services.

3. Equipment and data storage

The physical capacity of your IT environment and equipment is another important consideration.

Do you have the space to house the physical networking equipment you need to keep your business running smoothly?

Do you have sufficient data storage? Are you maintaining the health and security of your devices and sensitive data?

Overloaded equipment can bog down your systems, which can lead to slow processing speeds, connectivity issues, security risks, and even downtime.

Related Article: Device Management: Why You Need A Plan To Replace Your Business Tech

If you’re housing your IT equipment on premises, you’ll need to ensure you have knowledgeable staff capable of ensuring its upkeep and developing a device management plan to replace aging IT equipment.

If you’re running out of space within your building to continue housing your IT hardware on-prem, or you lack the resources to properly maintain and secure it, you may be considering moving some or all of your networking functions, data storage, or other parts of your IT infrastructure to the cloud.

An MSP can provide strategic analysis and insight to help you figure out the right cloud strategy for your business, whether that might be a full cloud migration or a hybrid cloud approach.

4. Security and compliance

One of the cornerstones of managed IT support is being able to provide network monitoring, along with a stack of advanced security tools to help safeguard your important physical and digital assets.

Have you already implemented strong cybersecurity measures to mitigate your business risk from cyber threats?

If you choose to implement your own cybersecurity controls, you’ll need to hire in-house cybersecurity professionals with the expertise to understand and adopt the right security solutions you need to meet keep your business safe and meet state and federal cybersecurity regulations.

Related Article: How Zero Trust Can Streamline NIST & CMMC Compliance For Your Business

An MSP, on the other hand, can inventory your IT systems and conduct a risk assessment to evaluate the effectiveness of your current security measures.

Besides managed network monitoring, MSPs offer a stack of robust security solutions, including advanced antivirus and anti-malware software, spam filtering, endpoint detection, multi-factor authentication, DNS filtering, and advanced firewalls.

MSP’s also offer regular employee security awareness training with personalized modules and real-world phishing attempt simulations.

5. Business continuity & disaster recovery

When it comes right down to it, perhaps the clearest way to determine whether or not to outsource your IT is to honestly assess how long your business could survive if your technology goes down—whether from equipment failure, natural disaster, a data breach, or cyberattack such as malware or ransomware.

You might not be able to fill orders or complete sales. You could miss out on a critical, time-sensitive business opportunity. You could also face reputational damage, customer defections, revenue loss, and other damage.

If your business operations come to a grinding halt, do you have the capacity and internal resources to withstand the fallout that could result with prolonged downtime?

If the answer is no, then managed IT could be a good solution for you. An MSP can develop a customized business continuity and disaster recovery plan tailored to your organization.

The Bottom Line In Determining If IT Outsourcing Is Right For Your Business

After reading this article, you now know five important things to consider to decide whether turning to managed IT services could work for your business.

With Kelser, you gain immediate access to a reliable team with specialized skills—including a vCIO, a business technology expert (technical alignment manager), cybersecurity and other IT professionals—to offer proactive solutions tailored to your business.

While we have years of experience helping small and medium-sized businesses like yours use technology to gain a competitive advantage and drive their organizations, we know that you have many choices when it comes to managed IT support.

That’s why we’ve consistently encouraged businesses to do their research on different providers before making such an important decision.

We feel so strongly about this that that we’ve even done some of the legwork for you. Check out our list of the top 5 providers in Connecticut. (Full disclosure: no, we didn’t include ourselves on the list to try to remain as impartial as possible).

Read this article to learn the criteria you should use when evaluating MSPs. Want to find out how managed IT can help fuel your digital transformation? Read about here.

Of course, cost is always a key consideration with any business decision.

There are many misconceptions about the cost of managed IT. When you weigh all of the factors we laid out in this article, however, you can better appreciate the true ROI of managed IT services

What's more, you get all of the managed IT services and support an MSP provides at a predictable monthly cost. 

Curious about how much managed IT support might cost your business? Use our pricing calculator to get a free, instant cost estimate.