Imagine you’re the owner of a boutique professional services firm. Your attention is constantly split between business development, client management, team leadership, and keeping the books balanced.
Because your 5-person team doesn’t have a dedicated IT employee, you’re also handling the company’s technology, managing Microsoft 365 accounts, resetting passwords, and updating your team’s laptops.
For a while this arrangement works, but soon your business starts to grow and you add more employees to the mix. Suddenly, you find yourself spending more time troubleshooting network issues, managing security updates, taking your attention away from your other responsibilities.
As the complexity of your business increases, so does risk–and your capacity to handle it all yourself. That’s when it might be time to hire managed IT services.
What Are Managed IT Services?
Most businesses without a formal in-house IT department don’t pay much attention to their technology. That is, until something breaks, leaving them struggling to find a technician who can quickly get their business back online.
Rather than simply waiting for something to go wrong, managed IT services give clients access to professional network monitoring, maintenance, cybersecurity, user support, and backups they can rely on.
The best managed IT consultants don’t just fix computer systems. They advise their clients on long-term infrastructure and strategic planning, and help them take preventive measures to minimize disruptions.
By outsourcing IT to a managed service provider (MSP), small and medium-sized businesses can get IT solutions that meet their needs today, and evolve with them as their business grows.
Signs It May Be Time to Hire Managed IT Services
So, how do you know when to hire managed IT services? There are a few telltale signs that it may be time to consider managed IT services.
Your IT Support Has Become Reactive
A company may technically have IT support, even if it’s just one person taking on extra responsibility. But the moment something goes wrong, they have to contact the owner, who contacts a technician, who then fixes the problem, and gets the company back online. In the IT world, this is referred to as a break-fix model.
The problem with the break-fix model is that it can lead to recurring problems, constant troubleshooting, and unproductive downtime without addressing underlying issues.
If your organization is stuck in the break-fix cycle, working with a managed IT services provider can finally bring that to an end. An MSP can provide your organization with ongoing monitoring, maintenance, patch management, security management, backups, and help desk support to keep your downtime to a minimum.
Your Employees Don’t Have the Time Or Expertise To Manage IT
Small businesses often tack on IT responsibilities to a team member who happens to “know computers”. Whether that’s an office manager, accountant, operations associate, or the owner themselves, that person can easily become overwhelmed handling the entire company’s IT. Even when there is a single internal employee dedicated to IT, they may not always have the expertise to evaluate endpoint security, identity management, backups and disaster recovery, configure cloud environments, respond to security threats, or keep up with compliance requirements.
Outsourcing IT to an MSP becomes a much more practical option for companies that don’t have the expertise, resources, or budget to have a dedicated IT department in-house.
Your Business Is Growing and Becoming More Complex
Between networks, cybersecurity, cloud platforms, and now the emergence of AI, modern businesses have become far more technologically complex than they were even a decade ago.
When your entire business depends on internet access, cloud applications, email, and access to company data to continue working smoothly, IT cannot become merely an afterthought.
As companies add new employees, open new locations, adopt new applications, enable remote working, the technology infrastructure required to support them also grows.
While there’s no magic number for how many employees are needed to recommend managed IT services, businesses can simply ask themselves “how much of our business relies on IT working correctly?”
When the answer is “almost everything”, it becomes increasingly difficult to treat IT as an afterthought.
Your Cybersecurity And Compliance Needs Have Increased
The security responsibilities of businesses have grown tremendously in recent years. It’s no longer enough to simply have an antivirus program. Businesses in many industries have strict data privacy and cybersecurity requirements.
When organizations don’t have anybody who “owns” security, or have a documented incident response process, consultants often recommend managed IT services to improve their security posture.
Managed IT services can help businesses keep devices patched, implement multifactor authentication and endpoint protection, maintain backups, and manage other security controls that can be difficult to oversee without deeper knowledge of cybersecurity.
IT Problems Are Creating Unacceptable Business Risk
Are IT problems creating unforeseen downtime? The problem with relying on a break-fix approach is that it can leave you vulnerable to unexpected system failures, lost productivity, and potentially damaged customer relationships. Calling an IT consultant to fix things doesn’t solve the underlying problems created by unreliable systems either.
When recurring IT problems create an unacceptable level of business risk, an MSP can help you get back on track. They can continuously monitor systems, maintain infrastructure, manage backups, and identify and resolve the root causes of recurring problems.
You Need Proactive IT Planning, Not Just Technical Support
As businesses grow, they need more. More devices. More software. More licenses. Growth is great, but if your IT infrastructure doesn’t scale along with the rest of your company, it can create serious problems down the road.
A business needs someone thinking about their infrastructure, security, and long-term technology lifecycle. Managed service providers do more than just troubleshoot computer problems. They help your business prepare for future growth.
How an IT Consultant Determines Whether a Business Needs Managed Services
Managed IT services solve a lot of problems, but they aren’t necessarily the right fit for every business.
Before making a recommendation, an experienced IT consultant will consider a range of factors about a company, including its size, technology environment, internal expertise, security and compliance requirements, and long-term growth plans.
A small company with a relatively simple IT environment may be able to manage its needs with a single IT hire, while a more complex organization may benefit from fully managed IT services.
Some companies can benefit from a co-managed approach, augmenting an internal IT role by outsourcing specific responsibilities like cybersecurity, compliance, monitoring, or specialized infrastructure to an MSP. This can be useful, for example, when a business accumulates dozens of security tools, but doesn’t have anyone in a dedicated role to manage their security environment.
Ultimately, the question isn’t simply whether a company has IT problems. It’s whether the company has the resources and expertise to manage its IT environment reliably as the business operates and grows.
Consultants who recommend IT services should recommend the service model that fits the business, not automatically recommend a full MSP relationship.
ITque: Managed IT Services for Clients
There is no magic number of employees that determines when an organization should hire managed IT services.
The right time is when IT complexity, dependency, and risk become too great to effectively manage internally.
Businesses that’ve reached that point can benefit from the expertise and proactive monitoring of a managed IT service provider.
If your IT environment is becoming more headache than you can handle, contact ITque today. We can assess your current environment and help determine which IT support model best fits your business.
