Outsourcing Your IT Needs

In this high-paced, highly competitive business world, it is almost impossible to keep up without spreadsheets, databases, accounting packages, email, a website and so on.  Computers have completely invaded our daily business lives.  It is hard to imagine being able to do much purely with paper processes anymore. 

The vast majority of businesses are small- and medium- sized corporations.  In most cases, the computers and networks need to just work.  Employees have little time for managing a network or digging through hundreds of spam emails daily.  That is a large waste of time that could be spent focusing on business problems.  For instance, if a business person spends the first hour of her morning just going through emails – most of which are spam – that could be 15-30 minutes of wasted time daily.  That translates into 2.5 hours wasted weekly and 10 hours a month wasted on just spam alone. 

As a business, you just don't have the time to deal with computer issues.  What are the possible solutions?  

Hire Internally

The first thing that comes to mind is hiring an employee to just focus on all of the IT needs in the organization.  Depending on the needs of the company, this could be a good move or one that creates more headaches.  If you get an inexperienced or inept network engineer, he can actually cause more problems for a business by improperly configuring the network and thus causing downtime.  To manage the needs of a company and avoid those issues, it usually takes hiring a senior-level engineer with a wide range of skills.

Outsource Your IT

The second option is to outsource the network and computer management to an external company.  If you manage to hire a good network engineering company, they'll have several specialists ranging from network security and email to procurement and maintenance.  In that way, you get a wide range of skills and capabilities only when you need them.  A good network engineering firm also has relationships with vendors to get better costs on equipment and software purchases.

A Combination of Both

When the budget allows, many of the medium-sized businesses will have a combination of internal staff and outsourced IT.  What this allows is the ability to hire a generalist that can handle most of the daily needs of a company and manage the more complex and specialized tasks with a network engineering firm. This helps a business get the best of both worlds and keep expenses down rather than trying to hire a full IT staff internally.

What Next?

If you would like to talk about these options or discuss analyzing your network to determine your needs and how outsourcing can help your business, please contact Hardwyre at 501.851.2880.