6 Reasons Why You Should Outsource Your IT Support

Deciding how to handle IT support is one of the trickier calls a business owner has to make. Do you keep everything in-house, where you've got full control and a team who knows your business inside out? Or do you hand the day-to-day running over to a specialist provider, freeing up your time and budget for the things that actually grow your business?

For most smaller and mid-sized businesses, outsourcing makes the most sense. And even for larger organisations with an established IT department, bringing in outsourced support for specialist skills or extra capacity tends to work rather than trying to do everything internally.

Here's why.

Why an internal team isn't always the answer

There's no denying an internal IT team has its perks. Support is on hand straight away, and your staff will understand the business, its culture and its systems better than anyone external ever could.

But that comes at a cost. Internal teams are expensive to build and even harder to keep fully staffed with the right mix of skills. A generalist IT person who's brilliant at fixing desktop issues might have no experience with cybersecurity threats or cloud migration, and in a business where technology moves fast, those are exactly the gaps that get exploited or left unaddressed.

Why outsourcing makes more sense for most businesses

This isn't about ripping out your internal team and starting again. Plenty of businesses run a hybrid model, with an outsourced partner covering the areas where extra expertise or extra hands are needed.

But increasingly, businesses are finding that a good managed IT provider does the job better, more cost-effectively, and with far less hassle than trying to build and maintain an internal department from scratch. Here are six reasons why.

1. You get specialist skills on tap

No internal team, however good, can keep pace with every corner of IT.  From Cloud migration to Microsoft 365 and Azure, choosing the right VoIP phone system and staying ahead of the latest cybersecurity threats all need specific expertise that's hard to justify hiring for in-house.

A managed IT provider gives you a whole bench of specialists rather than one generalist. Whatever the challenge, there's someone on the team who's already solved it for another client.

2. Your team gets their time back

Every hour your staff spend wrestling with IT problems is an hour they're not spending on the work that actually moves your business forward. Recruiting and training IT staff internally is slow and expensive, and it still leaves gaps.

Outsourcing takes the day-to-day IT headaches off your team's plate entirely, so they can focus on what they're actually there to do.

3. Your costs become predictable

With an internal team, IT is a fixed cost, covering salaries, training and tools, whether you need it that month or not. Outsourcing turns that into a variable cost you can plan around, and you only pay for what you actually use.

Want to add cybersecurity services or extra support hours? With an outsourced provider, that's a quick conversation and a clear price, not a lengthy and costly recruitment process.

4. It scales with your growth

Most outsourced IT providers, including us here at Flotek, work on a per-user pricing model. That means your IT costs grow in step with your headcount, rather than in expensive jumps every time you need to hire someone new.

It also means that as you grow and start looking at cloud migration for better security and efficiency, you've already got a partner with the expertise to manage that transition properly, rather than trying to figure it out as you go.

5. You plan further ahead

A good IT partner doesn't just fix problems, they help you see them coming. That means guidance on which technology investments are actually worth making, and early warning on the IT bottlenecks that could otherwise slow your growth down.

That kind of forward planning is hard to replicate with an internal team who are usually too busy firefighting to look much further than this week.

6. You reduce your business risk

Internal teams work office hours. Threats don't. An outsourced provider offers round-the-clock monitoring that catches problems before they become disasters, rather than finding out about them the next working day.

There's also continuity to consider. If a key member of your internal IT team leaves, so does a lot of undocumented knowledge about how your systems actually work. An outsourced provider keeps that knowledge documented and safe, so you're never left exposed by one person walking out the door.

Ready to Outsource Your IT?

Outsourcing your IT support gives your business access to a wider range of expertise, clearer and more predictable costs, and the capacity to grow without the growing pains. It takes the pressure off your internal team and puts proper forward planning and risk management in place, things that are genuinely difficult to do well with limited in-house resources alone.

At Flotek, our purple army provides managed IT support for businesses across the UK, with regional offices backed by a nationally coordinated engineering team. That means you get both remote support and local expertise on hand whenever you need it.

If you're weighing up outsourcing all or part of your IT support, get in touch with Flotek or call 02921 508000 to talk through what your business needs.