In a small to medium-size enterprise, and in particular with a startup, you’re required to wear many hats. Between managing a sales team, overseeing bookkeeping and accounting and tightening up operations, it can often feel like there is little time to focus on the core of your business plan. Areas including technology lifecycle management are often pushed aside because there’s no time or budget to dedicate to it.
While you may not be able to afford the time to focus on areas of IT, you can fall into the trap where you’re forced to continually put out fires or shell out significant sums of cash to replace failing equipment. Even if you have an IT professional or an IT team, it can be challenging for them to get beyond the minimum of keeping the lights on and systems running.
They may never get to the point where they can fully focus on a strategy for driving business objectives with technology innovation, or put together the disaster recovery plan you’ve intended to implement.
These are a few of the reasons why it makes sense to outsource certain areas of IT, like technology lifecycle management. Here are some benefits you can expect:
The End of IT Spending Surprises: When you outsource technology lifecycle management, you’ll never be shocked by future capital investments, such as needing to replace a data server or a fleet of mobile devices. Your technology will be monitored for future upgrades, replacement, and maintenance so that your invoices are consistent and you can plan your budgeting accordingly.
You’ll avoid other surprises, such as an in-house IT professional that quits or the realization that you’re installing new equipment that nobody in-house knows how to troubleshoot.
Time to Focus: With a technology lifecycle management provider handling all aspects of your equipment acquisition, upgrades, and maintenance, you’ll have more time to focus on core business objectives. The time that your IT team once spent on updates and patches, for instance, will now give your them room to strategize about your digital transformation and in what order you should migrate various applications to the cloud.
More broadly, outsourcing allows you to focus on the business drivers that help differentiate you from your competition.
Improved Security: Unless you’re able to dedicate part of your budget to an in-house security team, it’s likely that outsourcing technology lifecycle management will significantly improve your level of cyber security. IT companies are more familiar with the tactics that hackers use to attempt to access your system and have robust monitoring and resolution methods that are difficult to match in-house.
Expertise: One of the drawbacks of having only in-house IT is that it’s challenging to hire experts from every area of IT, and at precisely the amount you need them. For instance, you can’t hire one IT professional that will spend one hour per day on managing the maintenance of your hardware and then go home. You need to outsource to get that type of exact fit.
When you outsource, you’re able to access a wide variety of IT expertise, and in precisely the amounts you require. It’s easy to scale up or down and to take advantage of different areas of expertise as you need them.
Acquisitions at a Good Rate: When it’s time to make an equipment purchase, your technology lifecycle management provider is in a better position to negotiate the best possible price. For instance, if you need to replace the smartphones of your entire sales staff, your provider may be able to work with suppliers with whom they have a working relationship and secure you a better price.
Seamless Retirement: When it’s time to retire a server or a fleet of tablets, disposing of the equipment can be one of the more time-consuming aspects of lifecycle management. You’ll need to dispose of items in a way that is environmentally responsible but mindful of your budget. A technology lifecycle management provider can handle the removal of your retired equipment, and this service is included in your monthly invoice.
Strategic Planning: Rather than just purchasing new equipment when your existing equipment fails, a lifecycle management provider can help you take a strategic approach to your technology. From timing acquisitions to get competitive pricing to using maintenance to get a longer life out of a particular piece of hardware, you can measure significant gains from taking a strategic approach to managing your technology.
Standardize Your Infrastructure and Systems: A technology lifecycle management provider will help you avoid the common IT trap of an infrastructure that’s cobbled together, inefficient both in performance and costs. Instead, you’ll appreciate an infrastructure built for today’s efficiency and your future technology acquisitions.
Managing your technology through a provider allows you to focus on the core functions of your business while resting easy, knowing that you’re not about to crash with a system failure or be blindsided by a cyber attack. Contact us at PAG to learn more about the benefits of outsourcing your technology lifecycle management.
