Your IT team can use the added support of an MSP

It’s hard to predict a business’s future IT needs when things are just getting started. More often than not, it’s more important to get the company off the ground before investing in the technology you may or may not later need. But when things go well, there inevitably comes a point when resources — human and technical — fall short of needs.

Investing in a small, in-house IT team can maneuver a company through early growth spurts, but if things are going well, supplementing your in-house team with external support from a professional managed IT services provider (MSP) is the most flexible and affordable way to scale up your business’s capacity quickly.

How can an MSP support your in-house staff?

Just as some things are better handled by your in-house team, others are better delegated to an outside team. Cybersecurity management, in particular, is well worth outsourcing. The technicians that staff regional MSPs usually have many years of experience watching cybersecurity threats evolve, and keeping up with the latest security systems and tools is their full-time job. This frees up in-house staff to focus on business-critical and higher value-added tasks.

In general, complementing your in-house team with support from an MSP offers your company access to a broader range of technical skills and knowledge than you’d get from internal staff alone, and without the HR costs.

Below is a list of some of the top benefits of hiring an MSP to support your internal staff.

Specialized knowledge

Internal IT team members usually must be versed in a broad range of technological quick-fixes and workarounds, which is great — so long as that breadth of knowledge doesn’t come at the cost of its depth.

MSPs hire specialists in every field to round out their teams. If cybersecurity is your primary concern, an MSP won’t send you a generalist — you’ll get a highly trained security specialist, with certifications recognized not just in Utah or the United States, but around the world (don’t worry, they can still fix the printer, too).

The same goes for compliance. Are you in a highly regulated field, like legal or financial services or healthcare provision? MSPs keep up with the latest local, state, and national requirements for the industries they serve, and they know how to leverage the most current and cost-effective technology to keep you compliant.

Special projects and business growth

Big migrations to the cloud or from Exchange to Office 365 can often overburden a smaller staff already running the day-to-day aspects of an IT department. The risk is that the migration or any other large, non-routine project bottlenecks productivity and causes a backlog of service requests.

The same is true if your company needs in-depth security testing and assessment, a network redesign, and/or upgrade, or virtualization of any kind. By outsourcing major projects, you can meet your technology initiatives while maintaining business operations.

Employee morale

Dealing with the same end-user issues every day can become repetitive and, quite frankly, frustrating for your internal staff after a while — not least when there are larger, strategic IT issues to be attended to. It can slow down their progress with other goals.

And maybe, the rest of the office can sense it too. No one wants to interrupt the IT department when they’re in the middle of an involved project.

An MSP can set up a system that relays issues directly to an outside party when they come up so your in-house team can stay on track while end users still get rapid resolutions to their issues.

Clearly, these are only some of the many ways an MSP can support your in-house team. To talk specifics about how NetWize can help, call today.