In the realm of modern business, technology is of utmost importance. Not only do we utilize IT to store and analyze data but we also use it to establish massive and efficient computer networks.
Of course, holding all of this together takes effort, not to mention time. In many cases, the time and effort required are too much for a company to bear. In these cases, you’ll often find that said companies reach out to co-managed IT services.
Managed IT services provide numerous benefits, and, ultimately, serve to streamline your business. Wondering how? We’re going to get into all of that below, showing you exactly how you can streamline business with co-managed IT.
What Co-Managed IT Services Can Do for You
Co-managed IT services can do a number of different things to benefit your IT infrastructure. Some of the things they’ll do for you include the following.
They Can Keep Your Network Efficient
IT networks are ever-changing. Because of this, they require almost constant attention. If you don’t pay them this attention, they’ll fall behind and become inefficient.
The issue that many companies have is that they don’t have the staff necessary to properly maintain an IT network. They might even try to maintain it with the staff they have. Unfortunately, they often come up short.
This is where co-managed IT services can make a big difference. When you utilize co-managed IT services, you essentially hire a team dedicated to maintaining your IT network. They’ll check on your network on a regular basis, delegating tasks and making necessary updates.
They’ll also establish compliance plans so that your employees know how to use the network responsibly. This is in addition to tracking network users to ensure that nothing unsavory is happening within the network.
In essence, your co-managed IT service will keep your network efficient. They’ll do all of the mundane things required to keep an IT network optimally functional.
They Can Eliminate Security Threats
Security threats and IT networks go hand in hand. As long as you have an IT network, it’s going to have the potential of incurring security breaches. Should a security breach occur, the data within the network — as well as the network itself — could be damaged seismically.
This is why you need to monitor for security threats and eliminate them as swiftly as possible. Unfortunately, if you have a small IT staff, you’re going to struggle to do this. By using co-managed IT services, however, you’ll have more than enough help to keep security threats at bay.
Co-managed IT services provide 24/7 monitoring. They also maintain anti-viruses and firewalls to keep viruses as far away as possible.
They Can Standardize Your Network
If you want your team to work efficiently, you need to make your network as easy to understand as possible. This is achieved by standardizing the network. Standardization involves establishing rules and regulations about how specific network entities are used, organized, and labeled.
Yes, you could create these standardizations yourself. However, doing so takes tremendous amounts of time. Odds are, you don’t have the time or workforce necessary to get the job done regularly.
Fortunately, a co-managed IT service does. Not only will they create standardizations for your IT network but they’ll also facilitate them on a consistent basis. This way, your employees will always know exactly how to use your network.
They Can Keep Your Networks Up and Running
From your phone network to your websites to your computer network to your servers and more, there are all sorts of things that need to be monitored on a regular basis. If they’re not monitored, they could suffer crashes and thus cost your company substantial amounts of money in the meantime. These crashes could also serve to hurt your company’s reputation.
The issue, of course, is that it can be difficult to monitor all of these systems at once. Most businesses simply don’t have the manpower.
With a co-managed IT service, however, you have all the manpower you need and more.
The Ways in Which Using Co-Managed IT Services Streamlines Your Business
We’ve discussed what exactly co-managed IT services can do for your business. Now, let’s discuss the ways in which these actions serve to streamline your business. These include the following:
1. By Saving You Time
Managing an IT network isn’t a once-a-day task. It’s a 24/7 endeavor that requires a tremendous dedication of your time. Put simply, your staff has better things to do than to ensure that your IT ecosystem is efficient and secure.
By handing the task off to a co-managed IT service, you’ll save yourself and your employees a tremendous amount of time. As such, you’ll all have the chance to focus on more pressing matters.
Of course, while you’re focusing on more pressing matters, your co-managed IT service will be working to improve the performance of your IT network. The greater the performance of your network, the more improvement your business will see over time.
2. By Saving You Effort
It’s not just time that you save but utilizing co-managed IT services. You save effort as well.
See, monitoring an IT network on an almost constant basis takes substantial amounts of brain power. Even if you’re an expert at what you’re doing, you’re eventually going to burn out. If you burn out, you won’t be able to tend to other important responsibilities of running a business.
In truth, adequately managing an IT network requires multiple people. Yes, you could hire your own employees to focus on the task. However, for most companies, the more cost-effective option is to outsource the task.
This, of course, means hiring a co-managed IT service. They’ll put all of the effort into maintaining your IT network. You can put all of your efforts into more pertinent responsibilities.
3. By Saving You Money
As we’ve noted, it takes multiple people to adequately manage an IT network. And they can’t be just any people. They have to be people who are trained and educated in the process of managing an IT network.
As you might expect, such people command high salaries. By the time you’re finished hiring enough of them to manage your network, you’re bound to find yourself in a financial bind.
This is why, for most businesses, it’s wise to pass the task off to an outsourced IT management company. Co-managed IT services fully manage businesses’ IT networks but at a much lower cost than what those businesses would have to pay to their own employees.
Not to mention, when it comes time for payroll, there’s only one payment to make. This simplifies the payment process and thus allows your business to run more efficiently.
4. By Simplifying Analysis
If you want your business to run as efficiently as possible, you need to make your IT network as efficient as possible. And if you want your IT network to be as efficient as possible, you need to analyze it over time.
As you might expect, analyzing an IT network takes time. Not only do you need to track metrics but then visualize them through graphs and charts. If you don’t have an IT team, this is going to be a struggle and will likely waste substantial amounts of time.
This is where IT co-management comes into the picture. When you hire a co-managed IT service, you’ll have someone to run these analyses for you. They’ll provide you with regular graphs and charts indicating the present performance of your IT network.
They’ll also make suggestions on what you should do to improve your network. If you agree with these improvements, they’ll then help implement them for you.
At the end of the day, this results in an optimally efficient network. When a network is optimally efficient, it facilitates maximum productivity and therefore maximizes profits.
5. By Centralizing the Management of IT Assets
There are all sorts of assets involved in a modern IT system. These run the gamut from laptops to phones to tablets and more. If you want to run your company as efficiently as possible, you need to provide these assets to your many employees.
The issue is that programming and equipping your employees with these assets takes time. And, of course, there comes a time when you must retrieve them from departing employees. If you have a big enough workforce, this can be troublesome to manage.
Fortunately, when you utilize co-managed IT services, you don’t have to worry about any of this. This is because your co-managed IT service will handle it for you.
In addition to supplying and retrieving IT assets, your co-managed service will also program, activate, and deactivate them from afar. This will save you time and effort, and will thus enable you to focus on more pertinent tasks.
6. By Solving Small Problems Before They Become Big Problems
There are all sorts of problems that an IT network can encounter. It might be subject to a security breach. It might suffer from poor organization. It might not meet compliance in its given industry.
Unfortunately, the longer these problems persist, the more extreme they become. And the more extreme they become, the more serious the consequences can be.
This is why it’s vital to catch these problems early in their existence. The issue is that, for a small business, catching these problems early can be difficult. This is why it’s often wise for such businesses to utilize co-managed IT services.
Co-managed IT services regularly monitor their networks. As such, they’re able to spot small problems with security, organization, compliance, and more. By spotting these problems early on, they have the opportunity to nip them in the proverbial bud, thus preventing them from growing into more expensive problems down the line.
This has a great positive impact on a business, as it prevents it from having to spend undue time and money. In essence, it streamlines business operations by preventing unnecessary work.
7. By Keeping Downtime to a Minimum
The last thing you want during a busy work day is for your IT network to go down. If this happens, you might find it impossible to get any work done. This will cost you not only time but money as well.
Unfortunately, IT networks are vulnerable to situations that result in downtime. For instance, your IT network might crash. Should this happen, you would have to wait to work until it’s restored.
This is where IT managed services can be a major help. When you utilize these services, you receive near-constant monitoring of your IT network. This greatly improves the chances of staving off cyberattacks, crashes, and the like.
And even if a crash were to occur, you would have a highly skilled and experienced team on your side to help get your network up and running again. In fact, a truly experienced IT team would have recent backups of your network ready to go the second that your network crashes.
Interested in Using Co-managed IT Services?
As you can see, comanaged IT services can provide great benefit to a business. Are you interested in using co-managed IT services? If so, look no further than EMPIST.
We provide IT managed services to businesses in a variety of industries. These include but aren’t limited to the financial, healthcare, legal and manufacturing industries. By using our services, you’ll save time, money, and effort, all while seeing improvements in the security, efficiency, and performance of your IT systems.
Contact us now to see how we can help you!