No matter where your business is in your digital transformation, your IT infrastructure is essential business infrastructure. You simply can’t operate a modern business without it. How effectively it performs for your business, and how many issues you must deal with on a daily and weekly basis, can be a major difference maker—impacting everything from finance and accounting to customer opportunities and relationships to business operations.
And yet. It’s also difficult, and expensive, to recruit, train, and keep highly skilled IT staff. Even with a strong internal team, for most small to mid-sized businesses, it’s not feasible to keep in-house talent with expertise in every area of IT.
Often, you or your IT team find themselves stretched thin, spending most of your time putting out fires, instead of handling the routine preventative maintenance that can help prevent fires, or investing in strategic initiatives to help problem-solve bigger issues and fuel innovation in the business.
Even if it feels impossible to find the time, it’s essential to set aside time to regularly evaluate the IT challenges that have become major roadblocks to your business’s success. In this blog, we’ll explore the top five IT pain points we see businesses face and how an MSP can step in to help resolve these issues.
Complaints about slow Wi-Fi are often among your loudest IT complaints—and if you have network performance issues, they may also be your most frequent. Slow or unreliable network performance can severely impact productivity. Employees depend on a stable network to access applications, share files, and communicate effectively.
These issues are also difficult to resolve without getting into the root cause of the issues. If you’re already strapped for time and resources, or don’t have an internal networking expert on your staff, this makes it extra difficult. Fortunately, this is exactly the kind of situation where managed services, and an MSP (Managed Services Provider), can help.
When you partner with an MSP, you get access to a team of experts, who brings in not only specialized expertise but experience working through various network performance issues across a variety of situations and clients.
An MSP can diagnose network problems, identify bottlenecks, and implement solutions to ensure your network operates at peak performance. They can also help you ensure you’re staying on top of routine network maintenance—including data backups, device checks, and updates—that will help keep your network running effectively, and prevent major issues that result in downtime, compliance violations, and even cyber-attacks.
A great MSP also makes it their job to understand new and emerging technology, so they can help you identify when it’s the right time to invest in technology upgrades and when it’s time to wait. They’ll also work with you to test, prototype, install, and implement new network devices, designing an infrastructure that fits your business’s unique needs, including your budget. This may look like working in phases to level up your network. An MSP can help you prioritize which issues to resolve first, and how to maximize your ROI while delivering a network that empowers employees to create their most innovative work.
When business-critical applications fail or run poorly, it disrupts operations. Common issues include software bugs, compatibility problems, or insufficient resources. Whether it’s crashes, error messages, or slow performance, you’ll see employees be vocal when the applications they need do their jobs simply aren’t working.
MSPs offer expert troubleshooting and continuous monitoring, ensuring your applications run smoothly, and any issues are resolved quickly. This is another area where it’s crucial to take care of routine maintenance and updates as well. Software developers frequently release updates with fixes to bugs and issues in the code, as well as to improve performance. These bugs are known bugs, meaning, cyber criminals are aware of them too. When you don’t run your updates and install the security patches and bug fixes, you’re giving hackers an easy opportunity to exploit your systems.
System maintenance tasks, including disk cleanup, defragmentation, and system scans keep company devices and computers in good health, and prevent system-related software issues.
If you’re finding it difficult for your IT team to stay on top of these tasks, as they’re pulled, understandably, in a million different directions, an MSP can help by stepping in to take care of them on a regular cadence—freeing your team from that burden and helping to prevent many applications issues in the first place.
Inefficient or outdated infrastructure can hold your business back. Whether it’s aging servers, legacy software, or inadequate storage solutions, old infrastructure keeps the business from keeping up, let alone, getting ahead. Older devices, with outdated software and unsupported operating systems, are also more vulnerable to cybersecurity attacks.
Outdated infrastructure and technology also contribute to employee dissatisfaction: in Workfront’s 2023 State of Work Report, 70% of employees surveyed stated they don’t believe leadership is ensuring the right technology is in place. Previously, in the 2021 report, 49% stated they would leave their jobs over frustrations with technology.
These days, IT teams are tasked with ensuring your infrastructure keeps pace with constantly evolving technology, and hardware and software that has an inherently short shelf-life, while maximizing ROI and navigating tightening budgets for technology investments. It helps to have an external opinion and expert guidance. An MSP can lend their expertise to assess your current setup and recommend upgrades to enhance efficiency and future-proof your operations.
Every single business operating today has some level of connectivity and IT infrastructure; even a single-person firm. Which means that we are all at risk for a cybersecurity attack. We’re not ones to fear-monger but given that cyberattacks are not simply a part of doing business and living in our connected world, we do encourage businesses to stay realistically apprised of the risks. These days, the best modus operandi is to expect an attack to happen to you.
Yet, many businesses lack the resources or expertise to properly secure their IT environment. MSPs, particularly those offering managed security services (MSSP), provide comprehensive protection against threats like ransomware, phishing, and data breaches, ensuring your business stays secure.
For businesses in regulated industries, compliance is a critical concern. Navigating complex regulations and maintaining compliance can be overwhelming. But compliance is also no longer only for large enterprises; even the smallest of physicians’ offices and CPA firms are now being audited and held to the same standards as large companies. With ever-increasing cybersecurity threats impacting business of all types and sizes, regulatory compliance and cybersecurity insurance are getting more stringent, which means you’ll soon be required to take these steps, with a hefty financial impact in the form of non-compliance fees and increased insurance costs (if not insurance denials) if you don’t.
MSPs offer the expertise needed to ensure your business meets all regulatory requirements, reducing the risk of costly fines and penalties. They can partner with you to perform regular, comprehensive cybersecurity assessments, evaluate and inventory the compliance standards you need to adhere to, design defense postures and response plans, implement tools, and make internal governance a priority—again, bringing in their depth of experience and expertise to free this from your plate, while ensuring your business is compliant in practice, not just on paper.
Addressing these common IT pain points is crucial for maintaining business continuity and growth. But it’s difficult, costly, and time-consuming to try to take them all on internally.
By partnering with an MSP, you can leverage expert knowledge, advanced tools, and ongoing support to resolve these issues and strengthen your IT infrastructure. MSP’s also work through flexible, scalable services contracts, specifically designed to meet your needs and budgets. You pay for the services you need, when needed, and can scale up or down as you go. Companies can save up to 30% on IT costs by outsourcing rather than maintaining an in-house team.
Download our guide, Augment Your Team, Elevate Your Experience: the Ultimate Guide to Managed Services for Modern Businesses, to understand more about how MSP’s have evolved over the decades and what kind of services you can expect, the different options for customized solutions, how to start your conversations with an MSP, and what to look for to ensure you partner with a reputable, experienced, effective, and efficient MSP.