Who would you rather hire–an employee who comes in late, after your systems have encountered an issue, and takes twice as long to fix them as he said, or an employee who was ahead of the game, and managed to avoid issues before they influenced your business? This scenario is precisely the same one that you encounter when you weigh a break/fix IT provider against a managed service provider.
Who would you rather hire–an employee who comes in late, after your systems have encountered an issue, and takes twice as long to fix them as he said, or an employee who was ahead of the game, and managed to avoid issues before they influenced your business? This scenario is precisely the same one that you encounter when you weigh a break/fix IT provider against a managed service provider.
In order to understand the differences between the break/fix and managed services approaches, it may be helpful to run through how a common issue as it would be handled by each.
Break/Fix
As its name would suggest, the break/fix approach comes into play when some component of your IT breaks, and someone has to come in-house to fix it. While this approach was effective enough for a few years, it is no longer the best option to consider for your business and its needs.
This is largely based on the speed that business moves at today, with the help of technology. Imagine this situation happening to you: a piece of your hardware goes on the fritz. Of course, this hardware was necessary for a few of your employees to be productive, so that’s revenue thrown right out the window.
You also have to factor in the price the break/fix repairman plans to charge for their trouble to travel to the office, in addition to the cost of any repairs they make while they’re there. If they can’t make the repairs with what they have, you’re going to have to wait until they have what they need. This also can have the potential for a significant service charge.
So, tallying up so far, break/fix ultimately costs you time and money, in addition to the losses your business will incur because it was at least partially incapacitated for a time. You will also have to pay your staff for the time they spent at work, whether or not they generated any revenue for your company.
Clearly, considering its obvious faults, break/fix simply isn’t an economical choice. Fortunately, we still have managed services to examine.
Managed Services
Unlike break/fix, the meaning behind managed services takes a little bit of backstory. Essentially, rather than waiting for an issue to give your systems trouble, a managed service provider will monitor the technology you have in place to keep an eye out for issues, proactively resolving them before they cause operational deficits.
For a predictable monthly rate, your managed service provider will handle all of your issues remotely, preventing any issues they can from taking root, and working to fix those that they can’t.
This brings the usual tally for a managed service provider’s work to be whatever they charge as their monthly fee, with the odd exception of specialty services or work that lies outside of the contract. Even so, managed services allow you to preserve your precious uptime for as long as possible, which is beneficial for your business.
If you’re ready to make the switch to managed services, or to hear about our other solutions, give Symmetric IT Group a call at (813) 749-0895.
