5 Reasons You Too Should Outsource Your IT Department
By Ford Fisher Posted 5/26/2020 in BUSINESS
Market research shows a growing shift from internal to external Information Technology support solutions. But why should you outsource your IT department?
It’s simple. An IT support company can allow your team to focus on their core job objectives without constantly worrying about cyber security incidents in the workplace.
A managed service provider plays a key role in keeping your business well-protected and significantly reduces the chances of your team experiencing any downtime. The future of business is online, and a growing number of IT service providers are offering support that is both less expensive and higher in quality than the alternative in-house solutions.
5 ways an IT Provider can Protect Your Business
1. Network Monitoring Services
One of the many advantages of using a managed service provider is that it can provide your business access to network monitoring services. These are around-the-clock monitoring services that will protect your company from a wide array of threats and errors.
External service providers monitor activity for multiple companies and can supply staff coverage 24 hours a day and 7 days a week, which is a luxury most internal IT teams cannot afford. Either independently or by working with your internal IT team, the provider of network monitoring services can quickly identify any malicious activity or errors and stop them before they interrupt your flow of business.
When a virus tries to enter your network, it can be quickly identified and prevented from spreading to other areas within the network. The network monitoring team can also allocate or free up resources to prevent server down time if a server is running low on resources. In the digital age, down time results in lost revenue. By preventing revenue loss, many external IT providers can quickly pay for themselves.
2. Updates and Patch Management
Another advantage of outsourcing to an external IT department is worry-free security and patch updates.
How often are patches published? As frequently as they are needed. It is easy to miss an available update if no one is specifically looking for it. An external IT staff checks for updates as part of their regular routine. Even with the best internal staff, work on projects are a regular and frequent distraction that results in missed or delayed updates that might be critical.
A data breach can destroy the credibility of any company and make it almost impossible to regain the trust of clients. In addition, the best time to install an update is when no one is normally working. This is inconvenient for internal staff that normally assist your office team during regular work hours.
An IT support company will automatically download patches and security updates for each computer you contract for and provide detailed patch notes that discuss the purpose of each update. The best time to install updates can be scheduled with your external partner at a time that limits interference with your regular flow of business. Once a schedule is in place, you will never need to worry about bothersome updates again.
Security updates play an essential role in protecting your company from cyber threats and give your organization and customers much-needed protection from cyber criminals. Having updates installed as soon as possible is crucial to a secure network environment.
3. Data Backup & Recovery Services
Do you remember that time as a kid when you put hours into a report or project and then forgot to save it on the computer or the file was corrupted? The time you spent on it was lost forever.
When a similar incident happens on a business scale, the loss is multiplied by every member of your team. The company could lose both the time and the money invested into the lost project. When customer data is involved, it could be years of work that can be lost in an instant just because you did not have a backup. Even if you do have an internal backup, it can still be lost in a catastrophic event like an office fire. The loss of a server has put many businesses out of business.
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The good news is that in today’s world of high-speed internet, your servers can reside on the cloud. The servers can have an offsite physical backup, or you can simply maintain an offsite cloud backup. What does that mean? It means that if your local servers are destroyed, you may have to buy new ones, but all your work can be restored. Your customer data and the work your team has done is safe if backups are working correctly.
Like anything, backups can have errors, but most external IT providers are experts in redundant external backup procedures. Your business may need incremental hourly backups or be fine with daily or weekly backups, but your service provider will work with you to find the solution best for you.
In addition, they will monitor the backups to make sure they execute correctly. While these services and the required storage does have a cost, it is relatively small in comparison to the value of your teams work and your customer data.
4. Additional Employee Training
One of the best ways to prevent cyber security incidents is to focus on training employees. Specifically, training them how to avoid making common workplace mistakes. While you can construct internal training materials to cover common-sense approaches to tasks such as opening email, a managed service provider can offer additional employee training sessions that cover many different topics related to cyber security.
These training sessions cover not only identifying phishing scams and learning how to avoid opening malicious emails, but also things like how to design and implement internal access limitations on your network to protect data. Each employee requires a personalized level of access and successful security requires the correct implementation and policies. These training sessions can be scheduled at any time, and it is a valuable learning tool for any employee.
5. Anti-Virus & Malware Protection
New viruses and malware continue to emerge all the time, and it’s essential to outsource your IT department to a provider that offers protection against these threats. A managed service provider will allow your business to gain access to the latest anti-virus and malware software available, as it plays an important role in keeping your computer system well-protected. An IT support company will also continually provide upgrades for this software as well as monitor scan activity. The cyber security world is always evolving and improving anti-virus software, so it’s important to keep it updated.
Summary:
Cybersecurity is an ever-present concern in the modern workplace but outsourcing your IT department to a managed service provider can protect your company from a wide range of cyber threats. Of course, technology will continue to change over time, and an IT provider will ensure that your company remains on the cutting edge of technology, while also remaining safe and secure from cybercriminals at a reasonable price.
