Why Should I pay for Managed IT Services?
Why should I pay for managed IT services? I’m not paying anything right now and the “guy” comes over when I call him. This is what I hear the most when I am out there talking about IT services, and managed IT services. Paying a monthly recurring charge could sometimes be a lot to justify. I wish I had a quarter for every time I’ve heard “I’m not paying anything right now”. The reality is…you are paying. It’s just not per month. Let me give you a few reasons why paying monthly can actually save you money.
Advantages
The #1 advantage to using a Managed Service Provider (MSP) is the ability to be proactive. Proactive saves money. Updating antivirus, updating patches, scanning for malware, checking disk space, deleting temporary files, and more is done 24/7/365. Having your MSP notified before you even have a change to realize something has happened is more than just a luxury. For example, let’s say your internet connection goes down at 7:00pm and no one is in the office to notice it. Your MSP system monitoring software will notify the MSP and they will open a ticket with the carrier, and there is a good chance the issue could be corrected before you even come in in the morning.
So let’s put a cost to that. Let’s say you are not using an MSP. You come in the next morning and your internet is down. You have a hosted EMR, so you can’t get to it. You have 5 people in the office at $10 per hour per person. You are down 4 hours. That just cost you $200. Not to mention the Physician(s) and risk to the patients. Downtime is money.
The second advantage for paying for managed IT services is knowing exactly what your IT costs are. If you are paying $1000 per month, you know your IT costs are going to be $12,000 per year. Of course, if you need to upgrade your equipment, that would be additional, but you would pay for that whether you are paying an MSP, or using a local break-fix company. You could get hit with a 16-20 hour disaster, and you can ring up a $2000 bill in no time. In my experience, a practice with a $1000 per month IT bill will require an average of 2-4 hours per week of onsite time, and 2-4 hours per week of remote support. If you really think about it, using an Managed Service Provider will actually save you money.
The third advantage is that you don’t have to worry about how long it is taking. Unless it is urgent, letting the technician fix something properly will give you a more stable IT environment. If rushed, a tech could be forced to put a Band-Aid on a system, just to get you up and running…only to have the same problem fail again. At an hourly cost to you.
There is much more to an MSP than just having them monitoring your system, and coming out when something is wrong. An MSP is your partner. Your IT partner, helping you and guiding you so you can use technology efficiently. Technology is expensive. Don’t you want to protect it?
