Managed IT Services Solutions
IT Support is traditionally delivered in a reactive way: when something breaks you pick up the phone and an engineer arrives to help. The engineer invoices you for every hour spent and you don’t see them again until something else goes wrong. The problem with this approach is that it actually suits IT Support companies when there’s a problem. More problems mean more hours to invoice. In reality there probably aren’t many IT Support companies which actually operate this way, much less admit it, but the fact remains it’s a reactive model. And in todays highly IT-dependant environments, being reactive isn’t good enough. Downtime today can be extremely costly and could mean lost deals, delays, penalties and frustration.
‘Managed IT Services’ are a different way of approaching IT support. The actual mechanisms vary depending on the customers needs but there is always a fixed-fee approach. This means that when there are problems to fix the IT Support company is losing. A perfect Managed Service customer is a customer with zero problems needing zero support. Now the customer and the IT Support company are on the same side. There is therefore a huge emphasis on proactive support. Checking patches and anti-virus is up to date, regularly checking and testing backups, monitoring all aspects of the network for potential problems like delays or heat build-up.