IT Outsourcing for Small to Medium Businesses Information Technology (IT) outsourcing has many great advantages for small and medium size businesses. As all of our customers will attest, below are the benefits.
Cost – The cost of maintaining and supporting a business’s infrastructure can be costly. When outsourced, the costs are minimized in a number of ways:
- Staff; an intermediate skilled IT professional typically make between $55k and $65k per year. Add the benefits and taxes that a business pays on this and the cost is closer to $65k – $75K per year. When factored monthly the cost is $5500 – $6200. This is for just one person with enough skills to handle basic day-to-day IT support issues. At Skyline IT Services our service contracts run at a fraction of the cost to hire an in-house support person and includes a dedicated TEAM of certified and accredited IT professionals servicing the clients account.
- Training; technology continually changes and continuing education is a must for IT professionals to stay current and capable of supporting a business’s IT needs. Training varies depending on the technology platform and depth of subject, but typically an IT professional needs $5000 +/- of training per year. Because our business depends on out technician’s ability to understand and support the most challenging environments, we continually provide continuing education for our technical staff.
Expertise – With an outsourced solution from Skyline IT Services a client gets not one, not two, but a whole team of trained, certified and accredited IT professionals supporting all areas of their IT support needs.
Availability – When a business has an IT issue it needs a quick response. At Skyline IT Services, our technicians are quickly dispatched to a client site or remotely working to resolve the issue so the client can focus on business and not be distracted with IT issues.
Access – As an established Information technology service provider, Skyline IT Services has access to a plethora of resources to the benefit of our clients. From enterprise accounts with top level VARS (Dell, CDW, Ingram Micro) to strategic partnerships with companies like Microsoft. All of these relationships allow us the resources to provide premium services to our clients while saving them money.
Proactive – Maintaining servers, desktops, and network devices is crucial to extending the life cycle and minimizing downtime. However this critical task is often overlooked or ignored. At Skyline IT Services, proactive maintenance is the cornerstone of our services. Our clients save money from extended lifecycle of properly maintained hardware and minimized downtime from an actively monitored IT infrastructure.
Professionalism –Watch out from what we call the “Gollum techie”. IT professionals should be – professional. At Skyline IT Services all our staff conducts themselves professionally. In a professional business environment we expect our staff to dress accordingly, have the ability to communicate about technical issues at a level that all clients can understand, understand and respect the clients business and its objectives, consult towards future goals, and do it with a smile.
IT Outsourcing for the Corporate Enterprise
Outsourcing IT on the corporate enterprise level has many advantages and disadvantages to assess during the decision making process. Having been involved at different levels throughout my career while working in IT at various large organizations I have personally witnessed some of the advantages and disadvantages. As the ebb and flow of large organizations affinity to outsourcing their IT comes and goes with predictable certainty, just the same is the many academic papers that discuss these cycles and their successes and failures. Because of this and the fact that currently Skyline IT Services does not compete for IT sourcing on the enterprise level I excluded IT outsourcing for the corporate enterprise from the article. Skyline IT Services does however offer IT consulting to large organizations where the existing IT department could benefit from a special expertise not available in-house, augmentation of current IT staff, additional hands on a project, or as one client said “another set of eyes on a problem”.