Managed Service Provider or In House IT? How to choose for your business

Managed IT vs. In house, How to choose the right option for your business.

 When you’re running a modern business, you need to be IT literate and data driven. It’s the state of the world today and ignoring your IT needs will bring you nonstop headaches and troubles when all you want to do is grow your business and provide value to your industry.

So should you hire an IT person to your team? Should you enlist the help of an external managed IT support company? There’s also the option of a hybrid solution… How’s that headache coming along?

Not to worry, we’re here to demystify the process of choosing the best IT support option for you. Here’s a handy guide on whether to choose managed IT support vs. in house IT.

What is a Managed Service Provider in the IT space?

To start clarifying the benefits of using a managed service provider for your IT needs, it’s probably a good idea to give you a run down of what a managed service provider is and what they can do for your business.

Managed Service Providers are external experts in IT services and infrastructure. They can be hired to build up your IT infrastructure, fix issues, provide ongoing maintenance to your servers and equipment, and provide security protections.

This allows you to provide much needed support to your in-house IT crews if you have them, or gain a wide range of support at different price points if you are still growing your business and teams.

Benefits of an External Managed Service Provider

As a managed service provider ourselves, we may be biased, but there are loads of demonstrable benefits to having the help from some external experts come in to help you meet your business goals.

• One of the biggest advantages of external IT teams and managed service providers is their access to cutting edge, state of the art software solutions, usually at a much better rate than an internal team will be able to access. Whilst your IT team will inevitably get bogged down with budgets, helping out with password changes and switching on monitors for people, a fluid and agile managed service provider will constantly be on the lookout for the best new ways to develop IT strategies and solutions for their clients. At Jera IT for example, one of our core values is relentless learning. Our team are well placed to help out with simple issues but we’re also constantly attending industry events and training our team on new software.
• As well as this it is important to remember that a managed service provider will have multiple clients, especially if they’ve been around for a while. This means that they’ve tested the solutions out multiple times and know how to make them work for your industry. They will also have a relationship with the suppliers of these softwares, often allowing them access to better prices and more in depth training on the solutions.

Benefits of an Internal IT Team

Despite our external evangelism, there are also some undeniable benefits to having an IT team in-house.

• You have more control over a dedicated IT team you directly employ. They are often instantly to hand and can be moved freely around many different projects. It’s also easier to bring your internal team in touch with your internal policies and processes.
• It can also be slightly quicker and less complicated from a communication standpoint. Communicating with a good managed service provider should always be easy, but it will never be quite as quick as turning around and shouting to someone in the same office as you that your computer is acting funny.

Key Factors in Deciding Between Managed and In-House Support:

1. Company Size and Aims

If you’re a larger entity with huge resources at your beck and call and want to develop quickly and aggressively, an in house IT team of some description is almost a necessity. Many of our current clients of a larger size actually run a hybrid model. For the nitty gritty IT problems and issues they have a dedicated in house team, and hire ourselves for more niche work, like providing cyber security audits and ensuring their compliance with government regulations.

2. Current IT Literacy in the Team

If you aren’t that IT literate, hiring an IT team straight away will be exceedingly difficult. If you don’t understand the needs of your business and what the industry standards are, how can you hire a team to help you improve? Your best bet at this level is to find a managed IT support team with experience working in your industry and allow them to help develop your business.

3. Budget

Salary, legacy system maintenance and training costs tie directly to this decision for an IT team. Hiring internal IT support will often work out to be a more expensive option, whereas an external managed service provider is a little smoother and more flexible, allowing you to scale the services at your disposal as your business and budget grows.

Conclusion

As with any big decision, there are no true right answers here. What works for one business won’t necessarily work for any. We hope we’ve proven that we aren’t biased either way. We’ll always be up front with clients if we think we may not be the right fit for their needs. What we want most is for Scottish businesses to get the support and security they need. If you think that we might be a good fit, or if you’d like to talk with us about your needs in general don’t hesitate to give us a call.