Why You Should Augment Your IT Department During COVID-19

Should You Augment Your IT Department in Response to the Coronavirus Pandemic?

For many organizations, the Coronavirus pandemic shifted them into “crisis” mode – requiring them to find the tools and resources they need to continue operating from home. In truth, the Coronavirus pandemic has created a huge disruption within virtually all industries around the world. Those that didn’t have business continuity plans in place truly felt the weight of the situation as they struggled to:

• Transition employees to remote work
• Find collaboration tools to maintain communications
• Secure remote workers against cybercrime
• And much more

Meanwhile, many organizations, even those that managed to successfully transition to remote work, dealt with a ton of economic uncertainty resulting from the Coronavirus pandemic:

• Shutting their physical locations down
• Handling fewer sales and/or revenue due to a change in purchasing behavior
• Dealing with major disruptions to supply chains
• And much more

Going forward, we’ve all learned one thing’s for certain: technology, and more specifically, digital transformation is key to maintaining operations, no matter what sort of disruption occurs.

What’s The Take Away From The Past Few Months?

Organizations have struggled through the past few months – launching their business continuity plans, embracing remote work, and dealing with economic uncertainty while dealing with lockdowns and self-isolation. It’s been a difficult time with an unprecedented amount of pressure placed on c-level executives around the world, so what’s next? As we look toward opening back up, how can businesses learn from this experience?

For many organizations, the biggest takeaway is this: technology, and more specifically, digital transformation is key. But this simply isn’t possible when you’re working with a small internal IT department. Why? Because it would become far too costly to take on. After all, the costs add up quickly with in-house employees:

• Salaries
• Benefits
• Vacation time
• Sick days
• Equipment/software/workstations
• Overtime pay

Plus, even the greatest internal IT employees may not have access to the resources and/or technology partnerships necessary to truly embrace digital transformation. Fortunately, you can have the best of both worlds with co-managed IT services.

How Does Augmenting Your IT Department Help?

Essentially, you’re working with an MSP to augment your existing internal IT person or team’s capabilities, availability, and skill-sets. They have access to the resources and/or technology partnerships necessary to help you:

• Create a business continuity plan that keeps your systems, data, and applications available from any location.
• Automate time-consuming, routine tasks to minimize the need for manpower, and in turn, cut costs.
• Find opportunities for improving customer experience, products, and services based on access to real-time data analytics.

An MSP can work alongside your internal IT department – giving you the assistance you need at a fraction of the price of hiring more people. You pay a flat-rate monthly fee for access to an entire team of experts that can provide:

• Around-the-clock monitoring
• Routine maintenance
• Strategic planning
• Data backup and business continuity
• Cloud solutions
• Help desk support
• Microsoft solutions
• Compliance support
• And much more

This helps your internal IT department shine as they focus on what they do best while your MSP handles the rest. For larger projects like digital transformation, it simply makes sense to work with an experienced MSP that knows what they’re doing, helps you keep costs low, and ultimately, augments the capabilities of your internal team.

For more information, click here to get in touch with us or call us at (404) 781-0200.