In our last blog post, we covered reactive IT services and how they function. While reactive IT support is sometimes necessary, many managed service providers have switched over to a more proactive style. If reactive service providers are like firefighters, coming in to save the day during an emergency, proactive service providers are like security guards: preventing emergencies from even happening.
Of course, there is no way to stop every emergency from happening, and your managed service provider should be prepared for these emergencies when they happen. However, with strategic planning and careful monitoring, these emergency situations can be cut down drastically. At Preferred IT, we provide regular maintenance checks and monitor networks and systems to ensure our clients have the best preventative care possible. This means that we can fix a problem before it even becomes a problem, and often before the client is even aware of it.
The biggest benefits to your managed service provider acting like your personal security guards are that they save you time and money. It may be hard to see it, especially when the cost of a service plan is obviously higher than the hourly, break/fix fee. However, those hours tend to add up. We have found that our managed clients have often saved a ton of money over the debt they would have accrued otherwise.
You see, unpredictability is a major problem for small business.
When you are budgeting for your business, a flat-fee just makes more sense than trying to prepare for giant costs you can’t predict. This is where strategic planning comes into play. Your managed service provider can help you to plan and budget for an entire team of IT technicians to ensure that you, and your bottom line, are happy and secure.
Your time is valuable, too, and with a proactive IT support team on your side, you can be sure that you won’t be wasting your time trying to schedule an appointment with a technician to fix your problem. Since most problems can be prevented, or at least immediately detected, through monitoring, your IT team will take care of the problem as quickly as possible. Your productivity certainly won’t take as much of a hit as it could have.
Any small business that uses a network of computers to perform daily functions necessary to their business needs a managed service provider. Maybe you’re happy with cutting corners to save money, but if not, give us a call. We’ll even give you two free hours of technical support to prove how important proactive care is to a small business.
