Your Business’ IT Support If IT support plays such a big role on the success of your business, it stands to reason that you would want to establish how to determine what type of IT support will have the most significant impact on your business’ ability to create revenue. The first consideration that needs to be addressed is ensuring that your IT support can help you maximize your company’s uptime; and, that the support results in a net positive ROI. Minimize the Total Cost of Ownership There is a metric in business called Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). This is where a business determines how much it actually costs to own a product. For the average business, a server is the most important and expensive device, but once you factor in the expense in migrating files, regular and irregular maintenance, the cost of utilities that power the device, you may be adding a large percentage to the total. Minimizing this through viable output and consistently good performance can improve your ROI and limit your TCO. We’re not suggesting that you should go into a total TCO analysis of all of your computing resources. That would take a lot of time that you just don’t have. Our suggestion is, however, to keep in mind that proactive management carried out by an outsourced IT provider will work to maximize the value you will see from that device. This is because the more uptime your systems have, the more they can be used for revenue-creating possibilities. Additionally, if you want to go beyond outsourcing your IT support, you can utilize cloud computing platforms that remove your need for IT support completely. Since these platforms have dedicated IT professionals managing their own hardware, the price of which is baked right into the product, you won’t see additional costs from utilizing utility computing in the cloud. Boost to Productivity and ROI We’ve already presented how outsourcing your IT support can work to save you considerable money due to its proactive nature, but we should mention that you do have options. You can choose to do business with an outsourced IT provider, who admittedly already does business will other companies in the same fashion. With new automation that is available, not much is missed, but it stands to reason that if you are going with an outsourced provider that you may be concerned that your IT isn’t always being valued. For companies that don’t want to outsource, there are two options, you can rely on a break/fix provider that fixes technology as it breaks; or, you can work to hire a dedicated IT staff for your business. Regardless of what you choose, to keep productivity high, your business’ technology has to be available and functioning as intended. To maximize the return you see on your investment, you have to have systems up and running as intended, but also have to be financially conscious. Managed IT services make this possible. If you would like more information about IT support and services, contact the professional IT experts at SRS Networks today at (831) 758-3636.