You know better than anyone that managing your business isn’t something to be taken lightly. Keeping your technology in proper working order is just the icing on the proverbial cake, making the task of managing your business even more difficult. If you’re using normal break-fix IT services, this might be the case. Alternatively, managed IT services aren’t designed to burden you.
The differences between break-fix IT and managed IT services are as noticeable as the differences between day and night. Break-fix IT is basically the bare-bones IT maintenance that only takes care of technology when it breaks down. Managed IT differs by providing a proactive solution that prevents problems in the first place, saving your organization time and money in the long run. To prevent problems from happening, your IT assets are monitored for resource usage in order to minimize downtime.
At first glance, business owners might see break-fix as the better option because they are using funds to fix actual problems. However, preventing problems from happening in the first place is much cheaper in the long run. Major issues that can happen to an IT infrastructure have a significantly higher risk related to them, and cost more to resolve if left unattended.
Let’s take a look at the actual costs of break-fix IT versus managed IT services. Break-fix relies on someone identifying the problem and resolving it, but there are other fees that can rack up too and break your budget. Travel time, replacement parts, and other expenses can exceed your expectations and you’ll wind up spending much more than initially anticipated. Additionally, one of the most unexpected results of technology failing is often forgotten about: the downtime, which compromises productivity.
Employees using technology that isn’t working to the accepted standard aren’t going to help your business function any better, which leads to lost revenue. Keep in mind that you’re also paying your employees regardless of whether or not they’re getting anything done in the office, so if they can’t work due to ineffective technology, you’re wasting money on them.
Plus, what if the problem that happens isn’t just a singular workstation, and is instead a huge problem that spans the entirety of your infrastructure? If something happens that prevents your workforce from accessing critical data and applications, it’s a situation where you have workers sitting around, twiddling their thumbs until things are back in proper working order. In most cases, this is until your IT department sorts out the issue. In retrospect, it would have been easier to keep the issue from happening in the first place, instead of letting countless dollars bleed from your IT budget due to downtime and unnecessary expenses.
Enter managed IT services, which prevent issues from escalating into major problems, allowing you to have a predictable IT budget.
In their most basic form, managed IT services are designed to actually save your business money by taking out the unpredictability of managing technology. Instead of paying a large amount of money at a seemingly random moment, you pay smaller amounts over a longer period of time to make sure that you don’t experience major IT problems. Downtime can practically be eliminated, which makes sure that your business can continue operations without suffering from issues like data loss, hardware failure, and more.
Information Technology’s Role in HIPAA Compliance
With HIPAA, sensitive patient information cannot be disclosed without the patient’s knowledge or consent. As many healthcare businesses move to electronic health records,...