Co-Sourced (Co-Managed) IT. The Best of Both Worlds

Your business is a technology business. And you are not alone. Today, virtually every business is heavily involved and invested in technology. Whether your office is here in Atlanta or anywhere else in the country…or the world…your dependence on technology is in great part linked to how forward thinking you have been over recent years. But please don’t think that dependence on technology is a bad thing. Far from it. Technology is a powerful force that can multiply the effectiveness, reach, profitability and longevity of almost any business.

Let’s look at it from a very simplistic approach. How successful do you think your business would be today if all your employees were using quills and blotters? Fountain pens? Manual typewriters? Electric typewriters? Word processors with magnetic cards that had to be inserted each time they were used? Or a 1988 AppleIIC computer with 128k of RAM (today’s typical computer has 33,000 times as much processing power)? The point is, as much as we may complain about it, we are completely dependent on technology in one form or another, and not many people really want to go in the other direction.

But not only do we, as business owners, want the technology that can power our businesses forward, so do our employees. Studies have shown that millennials, for sure, and even Gen Xers, often look at the technology they will be given to work with before accepting many positions.

However, we also have to face the fact that today’s complex technology, as powerful and rewarding as it can be, doesn’t run itself. In fact, as companies grow, their technology requirements tend to multiply and serious choices need to be made as to how to keep your IT infrastructure at peak performance.

The two most obvious choices are to either hire an in-house IT professional, eventually growing to a full team, or outsource this function to a managed IT service provider. There are advantages to each: an in-house IT person or team puts skilled people at your fingertips. An outsourced IT provider brings a team with a wide range of training and certifications that can handle most any need.

Because each of these scenarios has distinct advantages, more and more growing companies are opting for a hybrid IT management system commonly referred to a co-managed or co-sourced IT, with the in-house IT executive or team, and the outsourced team, working hand-in-hand to give the employer the best of both worlds. Typically, the in-house team will then have the time to focus on high level matters, such as long-term IT strategies, leaving the routine, day-to-day monitoring and maintenance, help-desk, and repair work to the out-sourced people. Certainly, this is not cast in stone and each company can make its own decision as to where each function is best handled.

Regardless of how the tasks are sorted out, companies that opt for this hybrid generally discover several benefits:

Increased Productivity: With co-management, you know that IT support is available 24 x 7. You also know that your IT infrastructure is being monitored and maintained, even if your in-house IT guy is on vacation in Aruba. That means that your sales people can sell and your customer service people can service. When managed by outside professionals, IT "uptime" of 99.999% is the goal, increasing productivity across the company.

Reduced Expenses: Fixed monthly fees let you know in advance what your expenses are going to be and because you are sharing the cost of highly trained IT personnel as well as storage capacity (especially if you choose a cloud solution), companies using IT management companies generally find their expenses less than before.

Minimized Risk: By having the latest technology available, including the latest in security, along with people with the most up-to-date training, your protection against the ever-increasing level of cyber crime is reduced to a minimum, while your ability to recover and restore in the event of cyber intrusion or a network problem is maximized.

Easy Scalability: As your company grows, your IT infrastructure easily grows with it. You also know that the financial burden of maintaining your infrastructure has transferred from you to the IT management service, so you know they are doing virtually everything possible to keep it running at peak performance.

DynaSis has been providing managed and co-managed IT support to the small to mid-sized business community in Atlanta for almost a quarter century. The DynaSis team of 55 professionals, including more than 30 engineers, is highly trained and experienced. We are happy to provide you with a complimentary IT Assessment to help you understand where your IT infrastructure is today, and where it needs to be in the future. www.DynaSis.com. 678.218.1769.