Guide To Outsourcing Critical IT Functions In Canada
In today’s digital world, businesses need to outsource critical IT functions to maintain healthy growth and continuity, ensuring personnel carry out their tasks without additional non-essential obligations. IT outsourcing remains an effective strategy for fast-growing businesses, including startups, which may lack a reliable internal resource to facilitate various elements in their IT infrastructure. And with technology continuing to take shape in startups, SMEs, and established companies, outsourcing critical IT functions is thus crucial.
From software development to everyday IT systems management, businesses have several areas to outsource IT functions. Data storage and management remain a crucial form of outsourcing across different industries, where an organization entrusts its information to a third party for more agile data solutions. This post will provide insights into outsourcing critical IT functions in Canada, including a better understanding of outsourcing.
What Outsourcing Critical IT Functions Mean
In a nutshell, IT outsourcing is the practice of subcontracting different elements of internal IT functions to external resources: third parties. The intent is to free up internal resources and facilitate healthy business growth, maintenance and continuity. Besides, most businesses outsource IT functions to cut operational costs while maximizing infrastructure efficiency and effectiveness.
And with more and more organizations being reliant on IT, outsourcing critical IT functions has become a sensible growth strategy across different industries. This has made external managed service providers part of most modern businesses by changing IT operations and allowing greater flexibility. That said, here are some key benefits of outsourcing critical IT functions in Canada.
- Access to essential functions: Managed service providers have alternatives to essential services such as data storage and security. Whether utilizing virtualized software or requiring advanced expertise in your IT infrastructure, outsourcing allows you to integrate these services more efficiently.
- Improved security: With increased cyber threats targeted at all sectors, enterprises can access extra layers or security services to their systems with outsourcing solutions. MSPs integrate security services such as backups, data monitoring and protection, ensuring maximum system safety while reducing business costs associated with cybersecurity.
- Cost-effective: From high costs in cybersecurity to hiring or training IT managers, outsourcing helps guarantee reliable IT support through virtualized services at reduced costs. Coupled with better IT security, improved efficiency and virtualized solutions, businesses tend to remain more competitive with IT.
- Scalability: Hiring new staff to manage an existing IT infrastructure can be costly and time-consuming for businesses. Besides, scaling up or down may accompany significant changes within the organization. Outsourcing helps in scaling staff by integrating with ongoing and upcoming projects, as well as crucial tasks, instantaneously. This flexibility guarantees more control over projects without dedicated resources and time to hire and train new staff.
Top IT Functions Your Business Should Consider Outsourcing
Generally, startups, SMEs, and established organizations allocate adequate resources to different aspects of the business to ensure operations run smoothly, efficiently and within budget. Besides, most enterprises prefer to perform their operations internally, but it is always never the case for small businesses and SMEs. Most employees in growing companies serve different purposes, leaving out crucial departments, mainly IT.
Outsourcing crucial IT functions enable organizations to become more productive and flexible while embracing digital business practices. With that, here are four critical IT functions to outsource and streamline your IT infrastructure.
Day to Day Help Desk Duties
Businesses dealing with hundreds of employees usually experience a surge in customer queries daily. Besides the help desk department staff, other employees are likely to spend most of their time addressing issues outside their scope of work. This often leads to reduced productivity, since it burdens other employees. With outsourcing the help desk, your business gets a dedicated staff that addresses customer concerns, allowing your staff to focus on their tasks entirely.
Furthermore, IT service providers are equipped with the latest and versatile tools and help desk solutions to facilitate daily servicing of clients’ concerns. This ranges from ticketing management to remote monitoring, patching and system updates. Outsourcing day-to-day help desk duties help simplify operations and promote employee productivity, essential for achieving business goals faster.
Network Management
Handling all network management tasks in-house can be challenging for startups and SMEs, especially when they cannot solve certain elements. Most scenarios occur when IT admins lack the necessary knowledge to address emerging issues like network design and configuration, data migration and integration, disaster recovery, and LAN and WAN management. Outsourcing makes it easier for organizations to access adequately trained resources to facilitate their network management duties.
IT MSPs are equipped with specialized tools and services to manage networks with minor difficulties proactively. And with changing trends in technology, IT professionals continue to learn new network management techniques, ensuring organizations receive up-to-date solutions and achieve more than when having an in-house team. Besides, they offer real-time monitoring for performance issues, wireless access point issues, among other network duties.
Network Security
With advancements in technology and its security, cyber threats continue to ravage millions of businesses around the globe. Besides, cybercriminals develop sophisticated attacks to navigate existing IT security protocols to access sensitive company and customer data. This means that companies require constant software and hardware updates, numerous patches, and a dedicated team to help prevent and minimize vulnerabilities.
But with the staff preoccupied with designated duties, including changing trends in attacks, outsourcing delivers robust network solutions. Typically, MSPs have network security knowledge, skills, tools and solutions to provide an internal IT resource with all their security duties. Real-time monitoring, email security, firewall management, vulnerability assessment and other solutions help provide maximum IT security against potential threats.
Special IT Projects
Lacking a fully staffed IT department can be disastrous for an organization to launch special IT projects such as VoIP deployment, server integration, network upgrades and desktop rollouts. IT MSPs can help internal IT resources commerce and complete their special projects when outsourcing critical IT functions. It is an effective way for companies facing budget constrictions to hire a well-equipped IT department.
In general, outsourcing provides solutions to potential challenges organizations are likely to face when conducting various IT projects. In addition, it helps organizations draw knowledge from talented IT professionals with several years of experience. Using the expertise, tools and solutions from IT managed service providers ensures organizations complete their projects successfully and at reduced costs.
Get Started with Outsourcing Critical IT Functions Today!
Outsourcing offers numerous benefits to different companies, regardless of size, especially in outsourcing critical IT functions. Tektonic understands the value of having a dedicated IT department, offering seamless and efficient solutions to your organization. Our IT company offers professional and timely managed IT solutions to facilitate all your IT functions. For more information, contact us to learn more or schedule an online virtual meeting with us today!