Your business has been thriving pretty fine. Your clientele has grown, and customer engagement increased. You now have branches in various geographical locations, and chances of you beating your competition are quite high. But, from your evaluation, your IT support system is wanting, posing a significant risk to your business progress. Without a doubt, outsourcing for virtual IT support is the best way forward to better your business’ communication and related operations.
Maintenance is KEY
It is a great idea to plan to outsource your IT support services. You have considered that the service provider offers responsive IT support and technology services. They also handle all their services highly professionally. Nonetheless, it is imperative that you also plan for its maintenance. But, in that, should you go for reactive or proactive maintenance for your IT support system?
Reactive Maintenance
This maintenance plan addresses fixing IT support system failures when they happen. In the short run, reactive maintenance does not cost much as you do not invest in maintaining the entire system. However, in the long run, these costs add up to a large amount that eventually makes maintenance costly. Typically, that can rise to up to five times what you’d have otherwise spent on proactive maintenance. So, if you are after adding more value to how well your virtual IT support functions, aim at allocating reactive maintenance, at most, 20 percent your maintenance budget. That should be enough to cover for any low-value, unplanned IT maintenance processes.
Proactive maintenancecien
The problem with unplanned maintenance is that they can turn overly complicated quite fast. That can quickly translate to rushed decisions, working overtime to resolve the issue, missed deadlines and lost customers. But, you can dwarf all these potential risks by hiring an established provider of virtual IT support services with proactive maintenance. With that, you can anticipate and manage every IT support failure before it happens. You will easily identify and correct root causes to these failures. You also will identify potential system failure locations in which to leverage timely maintenance to avoid system breakdowns.
For a long time, maintenance only addressed issues when they occurred. In that, companies have lost data that they could have salvaged if they nipped an IT problem a little earlier. The cost of retrieving such data has always been high. And, since every business information is critical, data retrieval is not an option to bargain. Getting the IT support system back to full-performance is also expensive. So, reactive maintenance plans remain costly while still not being of much help in sustaining IT support system performance. But, with proactive maintenance, you can identify these problems long before they occur. That will help your maintenance service provider to correct the issues early enough to keep your IT support system on optimal performance. Better still, that will come at a reduced cost as you will not spend on having a complete overhaul of the IT support system.
So, choose wisely. Maintenance for virtual IT support systems should not be overly expensive. Save that extra cash for developing other parts of your virtual IT architecture .