IT often gets labeled as a “necessary expense” by business owners, seeing it as something they pay for when things stop working or break. When this is the position a business takes on IT, dust accumulates and when things break, they really break.

However, when business owners take the proactive step of partnering with a Managed IT Services company, IT becomes an investment to grow the business. Downtime is reduced, cyber risk is lowered, costs stabilize, and distractions for leadership are lessened.

Reduced Downtime

The length of downtimes vary, but even short outages add up over time. If old devices are still in use but take a couple minutes to boot up, then your employees are losing hours, days, and weeks worth of work for small outages… and that’s not even mentioning the bigger, longer outages.

Few things are more stressful and frustrating than an unexpected outage or crash that leads to prolonged downtime, but one of those is having to pay that emergency bill. In a pinch, the “break & fix” IT providers charge hefty hourly rates, sometimes reaching upwards of thousands or tens of thousands!

An expert IT provider reduces unplanned downtimes by proactively monitoring systems, automating security patches, and addressing small issues before they become big problems. Through this, businesses experience reduced lost work hours, fewer missed deadlines where IT is to blame, and less revenue leakage.

Lowered Cybersecurity Risk and Recovery Costs

A cyber incident is expensive, regardless of its size. On top of the likely tens of thousands of dollars it will cost your business upfront to address and fix the incident if you view IT as a burden, but your business will experience lengthen downtimes, lost business, and reputational harm that could potentially to irrevocable harm. That’s why it’s reported that about 60% of small businesses close within 6 months of a successful cyber attack.

Managed IT Services offers layers of protections to help defend your business against the threats of both today and tomorrow. Providers utilize security tools and measures like multi-factor authentication (MFA), Advanced Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR), email filtering, data backups, and more.

All of this helps ensure that your business is more secure than just hoping and praying that attackers won’t target your business.

Predictable Budgeting and Fewer Suprise Costs

When we talk with small and medium-sized business owners, we often hear their excitement at the prospect of being more proactive with IT, but they’re always disinterested when it comes to price. In their minds, they currently spend little-to-no money on ongoing IT services right now, so why would they want to increase that cost drastically for each month for ongoing support? It’s a great question because it comes from a place a frugality and shrewdness.

Let me give you a non-IT example of why it matters. One of our Marvel IT Team Members, Geoff, drives a car that came from Buffalo, NY, land of long and harsh snow seasons. This car has been through many winters in Buffalo, which means that its been exposed to years of road salt that’s built up rust that eats away at everything underneath the car. Because of this issue, Geoff takes the proactive step of making sure that every time the car’s oil is changed, they check for weak spots that are created by rust.

Sure, it costs a little extra time and money to go through this, but Geoff knows its important to make sure his car doesn’t have a catastrophic failure while he’s driving it. By doing this, Geoff, with the help of mechanics, has caught multiple rust issues that were treatable for hundreds of dollars before they became thousands of dollars to fix.

Proactive IT management is the same exact thing, just a different industry. Sure, a monthly recurring cost might be not as flashy on the budget line as no cost is, but a bill for tens of thousands of dollars is potentially fatal to a business. Plus, all that money you spent in “emergency mode” is often less expensive than a full year of Managed IT Services, and a good provider likely would have caught that $10,000+ issue.

Increased Employee Moral and Satisfaction

When IT works reliably, employees are less frustrated and more productive. Fast machines, reliable networks, and quick IT support during business hours helps to reduce friction and improve staff moral. Employees spend less of their days on avoidable IT issues, and your business unlocks more hours of productivity that were previously dedicated to fixing and venting about IT problems.

Invest in Your Success with Managed IT Services

In the long erm, Managed IT Services typically pay for themselves through reduced downtime, lower risk, predictable costs, and improved productivity. By empowering your business’ critical workflows and lifelines, your business is prepared for success.

If you want to explore a clear picture of what ROI could be unlocked for your business, ask your current provider for examples of what could be enhanced in your environment.

Don’t have a current provider? We here at Marvel would be happy to offer your business a 100% free consultation to explore what a great IT solution for your business would be.