Entrepreneurship received a profound boost in America over the last few years. In 2021 alone, people launched or took the initial steps to launch approximately 5.4 million businesses — many of which were in the e-commerce space which comes with a heightened need for information technology services. It also makes the talent shortage in IT a problem for business owners. If your Denver, Colorado business falls short in the IT employee department, a managed IT services provider can fill the void. This article will detail key factors to bear in mind when choosing between the various options in the market.
It might sound counterintuitive, but an internal assessment is always the best place to start. If you don’t know at least some of what you need going into your selection process, you’ll have a hard time picking a provider who can meet your needs. Granted, if you don’t have any IT staff, that can feel like an impossible step.
Don’t focus on the technology. Instead, focus on your pain points. What do you want to do but can’t? What can you do now that you wish worked better, faster, or both? For example, do you create local backups on portable drives but wish there was a better way? Cloud backups can make that process automatic.
Do you wish that you could run more computers or have more cash registers without the expense of buying high-end equipment? Virtualization can let you run your operating system, software, and even a POS system from the cloud.
Even if you aren’t an IT expert but know the problems you need to solve, it gives you a list of topics to ask a managed services provider. If they can’t solve all the problems on your list, you need a different MSP.
Cloud services are extraordinarily powerful, but they come with certain limitations. While a managed IT company in California can handle all kinds of things remotely, they’ll struggle with tasks that require an on-site hardware fix. For example, let’s say that you operate some of your hardware using local WiFi. What happens if the signal is weak? That’s not a problem you can fix remotely. In most cases, it means adjusting the physical locations of routers or repeaters.
Choosing a managed IT company in your local area means you can get on-site technical support, maybe even on the same day. That can save you a lot of money if your business depends on connecting to the internet. Let’s say that you sell through multiple online sales platforms. The odds are good that you use a real-time inventory management system to keep those platforms updated about how much stock you have for each product. Getting that system reconnected can help you avoid an expensive problem like a stockout.
Experience matters, regardless of the industry. It holds as true with an MSP as it does for a restaurant or an accounting agency. You want a managed IT services company that has some experience under its belt. Bear in mind that experience can mean more than one thing. A business that opened 20 years ago obviously has a lot of experience. Yet, a business opened three years ago by people who all worked in IT for 20 years may have even more specialized experience. Just make sure you dig into the company a bit to ensure that you choose a business that can bring some actual expertise to the table.
What a managed services business offers is important but so is how the business delivers those services. Some IT service providers take an à la carte approach. They simply provide individual services at a given price. You pick out the services you want, and they stack up the prices for each service to calculate your bill. Other providers offer tiers or bundled services at flat rates.
For businesses with minimal or nonexistent IT departments, bundled services or tiered services often provide the best value. You get access to expertise in a wide range of important areas, such as cybersecurity, which can improve and secure your systems better than what you can do on your own. If you have a fairly strong IT department, the à la carte or co-managed approach can make more sense. You can shore up your IT infrastructure in a particular area while leaving everything else intact.
You should also pay attention to what kind of customer support they offer. Can you call a hotline or will they only reply by email? What is their average turnaround time? Turnaround time might not seem that important, but having your IT system malfunction for 6 hours is much less catastrophic than having your system go down for 12, 18, or even 24 hours.
If you can get on-site support, how often can you get that support? For example, if you enter into a multi-year contract for services, you probably want to be able to get on-site support more than once or twice per year.
Picking the right managed services provider takes more than just looking for a good price or going with whoever shows up at the top of a Google search. Your business is unique, which means that it has unique needs. Always start with an internal assessment and look for your pain points. There will always be some flashy new technology out there, but those pain points are the real problems you need an MSP to solve for your Denver business.
Beyond that, keep proximity in mind. Yes, remote services can do a lot, but they aren’t a complete replacement for a provider that can send out a service tech to look directly at your hardware.
Meriplex specializes in managed services for businesses in the Denver area. If you want to learn more about managed IT services, contact us for more information.
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