It doesn’t take much to realize the world of IT is continuously changing and evolving. Whether it’s the day to day operations of a small organization or the gradual progression year after year, change is the only constant. One of the largest, and definitely the most notable changes is the service commonly referred to as Managed Services. It all started with break-fix only. The term is pretty self-explanatory – if something broke, the company called and their IT Service Provider and they came in to fix it. As time went on, the IT engineers and support teams developed procedures and programs to periodically do system checks; looking for signs of failure. In comes the proactive team approach to issues, problems, and outages. AKA Managed Services.
Instead of following the old-school tradition of break-fix (again, literally meaning wait until the server, desktops or other critical networking devices fail, then scramble to fix them), a business operating with managed services focuses on the prevention of issues before they disrupt employees, management and/or clients. Today, no business can really afford the risk and uncertainty of relying on a “Break-fix maintenance service” because your business is too dependent on having a reliable IT system.
Just like larger companies, small businesses need technology to operate efficiently and to compete effectively. But as reliance on IT grows, the resources needed to support this increasingly complex IT environment may not. In many small businesses, IT resources are limited and can be quickly overwhelmed. If you fall behind in keeping up with things such as backups, patches and security, the odds greatly increase that you’ll face an IT outage or another problem down the road that will negatively impact your business. The 24/7/365 proactive monitoring may sound all well and good, but there are some additional benefits affiliated with a sound Managed Service practice. Here are just some of those benefits.
- Increased operational efficiency
- Reduced operating costs
- Cost-effective access to enterprise support (PEI’s team of senior level engineers)
- Minimized downtime
- Allows you to focus on the business rather that the technological problems and outages
- Complete peace of mind knowing that the network is monitored 24/7
If you’re tired of spending too much on your break-fix cycle, you only have 1 “IT guy”, or you’ve lost money due to an outage, call PEI immediately. Our team of senior level engineers will help you and your team seamlessly transition, but we’ll get the job done right the first time!
Matt Dixon, PEI
