5 Ways Your IT Provider Should be Helping You Save Money

For businesses looking to streamline their IT management, and benefit from a range of technical skills on-tap, IT support outsourcing is great option. For SMEs in particular, outsourced IT support can open up a world of cost savings compared to operating an in-house IT function, a leading reason why many businesses choose outsourced IT support in the first instance.

But what if we were to tell you that the cost savings don’t (or at least shouldn’t) stop there. Your IT support provider should be playing a pivotal role in helping you extract maximum value from your technology, using a range of initiatives and strategies designed to save your business money while delivering the peerless IT services you need to run your business, and serve your valued clients.

 

Computing Dynamics – Unrivalled IT Support and Strategy for Northamptonshire Businesses

 

Here at Computing Dynamics, we strive to deliver IT support and management services that deliver real, measurable value to our clients. By listening and responding to the individual needs of the businesses we serve, we provide secure, tailored solutions that address persistent business problems and unlock commercial value.

Sadly, some IT providers give little thought to the strategic value their services and solutions provide to their clients. When this happens, a business’s IT can develop into a financial burden, as opposed to the value-driving asset that it should be. To help you determine whether your IT support provider is helping you use technology to unlock cost savings, here are 5 ways your IT provider should be helping you save money.

 

Realistically Costed Solutions

Your IT provider should be attentive to the budgetary limitations and commercial realities of your business. They should have an astute understanding of the objectives you require a solution to achieve, and be able to recommend solutions that offer the optimum blend of value and performance. This approach should extend to choosing software that balances cost with capabilities and helping to source hardware that offers an appropriate level of specification for the required tasks.

If your provider is proactively committed to helping you save money, they might also undertake regular technology cost audits, to help you identify IT overspend, waste, and underutilised resources across your business. The result of these exercises will allow you to rationalise and streamline your technology stack, by eliminating underused software subscriptions, substituting costly services and solutions with cheaper alternatives, and standardising your technology to unlock longer term cost efficiency savings.

 

Efficiency Boosting Initiatives

Your IT support provider should willingly offer support and guidance on driving efficiency savings through process and workflow optimisation. This can be particularly beneficial from a strategic standpoint, as they should be able to align your technology and processes with industry best practices, and provide a fresh, unbiased assessment of how efficient your current setup is.

Your provider should offer analysis of your workflows business-wide, to help you identify productivity bottlenecks and components of your IT environment that are inhibiting your productivity. Then, armed with their technical expertise, they should help you source and deploy solutions to help streamline, and (where possible) automate your workflows. This might involve the adoption of specialised enterprise software, such as an enterprise resource planning system, or the introduction of business process automation (BPA) or robotic process automation (RPA). It could even be as simple as replacing your existing document storage and retrieval system with a solution that makes it easy for your team to find the resources they need. These changes will help your employees get more done in less time, allowing you to serve your customers more effectively and minimize staffing costs.

 

Security and Compliance

From operational disruption and non-compliance fines to reputational damage that results in long-term revenue loss, data breaches can have severe consequences that linger long after the incident in question. Your IT support provider should be committed to delivering a myriad of overlapping protections designed to enhance the resilience of your business, support your business continuity aims, and safeguard your data against a range of online threats.

 

These protections should seek to ensure the confidentiality, integrity and availability of your business’s data, three key elements of information security, all of which are fundamental to protecting your business’s commercial interests and helping you maintain data protection compliance.

 

Firewalls, encryption, endpoint antivirus and regular security updates are just some of the measures they should be taking to defend your environment against security threats. User identities and access management controls should be proactively managed to maintain data confidentiality, and multi-factor authentication should be activated and enforced where possible. Your IT support provider should also offer a managed, and regularly tested data backup service, to ensure your business-critical data and systems are quickly recoverable following a security incident: a key requisite to maintaining data availability.

 

Scalable and Flexible Solutions

It’s important that your IT support provider takes into account your business’s future ambitions and growth plans when developing and implementing solutions. IT infrastructure that struggles to flex and adapt to your needs can quickly become a cost burden, and it could even present a barrier to growth if it can’t easily expand to accommodate increased workloads. Consider whether your IT provider has ever enquired about your medium- and long-term ambitions, and if so, have they acted on this information by helping you created a future focussed IT strategy.

Today, cloud services, virtualisation, and flexible, subscription-based software pricing makes it easy to match IT resource provision to the changing demands of any business. Your IT support provider should be conducting regular cost reviews, to ensure you’re not paying more than you have to. They should also help you source flexible, cost-effective software models that offer the capabilities and outcomes you require at the most competitive price.

 

Proactive IT management and Support

Your IT provider’s support should be proactive by default. Dynamic, real-time network monitoring, diligent software patching, and regular maintenance should feature as the cornerstones of their service. By employing a pre-emptive approach that seeks to forestall IT issues before they escalate into disruptive downtime, you’ll enjoy undisrupted operations that foster better productivity, allowing you to serve your clients reliably without interruption.

A proactive approach to maintenance can also help you extend the life of your IT assets, allowing you to extract maximum value from your hardware investments and reduce the need for costly hardware replacements and software upgrades. Additionally, your IT provider should be taking regular action to optimise the performance of your network, using network health assessments as a basis for addressing traffic bottlenecks and other inefficiencies. This will ensure your team is equipped with fast, stable IT infrastructure that supports maximum productivity.

 

In Summary

In short, your IT provider should be an instrumental force in helping your business harness cost savings through technology. From cost-effective solutions that deliver maximum return on investment, to expertly managed cyber security and proactive maintenance, these are just some of the ways your provider should be delivering a value-for-money service  that supports your business’s commercial ambitions and growth journey.

 

Unlock the potential of your IT, with Computing Dynamics 

We’re holistic specialist providers of managed IT support in the UK that help businesses to upgrade, maintain and secure all aspects of their IT, so that they can grow their business with confidence. If you’d like some friendly, expertise-driven guidance for your business on its technology journey, get in touch today!