IT Services Elk Grove

trends Of IT Services In ELK Grove

Even though technology has become an everyday fact of life, for many people, and many SMBs, it’s still something of a mystery. In the business world, in-house IT teams can be used to make sense of it all, but with a global shortage of IT staff, it can be challenging to fill vacancies (and keep people in-post), especially for SMBs.

Fortunately, there is a wide range of IT service providers in Elk Grove, who can take care of any or all of your IT needs without you having to recruit your own staff. Here is what you need to know.

Steps to Choose Your IT Services

1. Colocation and managed hosting providers can take care of your infrastructure needs

Colocation basically gives you a secure place to house your own infrastructure, which you buy, install, maintain and manage yourself (or have another vendor install, maintain and manage on your behalf). Colocation vendors provide electricity, internet, and physical security. Everything else is down to you.

Managed hosting providers lease managed infrastructure. They will typically take care of everything right up to (and usually including) the operating system on the server. This means that the client only has to manage applications and data and other IT service providers can take care of that for them. In fact, some managed hosting providers will even offer further managed IT services at extra cost.

For the sake of completeness, the public cloud is essentially a variation of managed hosting. The key point to note, however, is that public cloud providers are only responsible for securing their own platform against external threats. It’s down to each client (or “tenant”) to make sure that they are using the public cloud platform securely.

The first piece of good news is that a reputable public cloud provider can generally do a much better job of securing their platform against external threats than the average SMB could manage on their own. The second piece of good news is that there are IT service providers who specialize in assisting SMBs to use the main public cloud platforms safely. This includes Office 365, which is probably the main public cloud platform for many SMBs, especially smaller ones.

2. Managed IT services and IT support can keep everything running smoothly

Managed IT service providers, to take care of regular maintenance tasks for a regular fee. That is all they do. It is a very big and important all, but it is still not everything. You will almost inevitably have some projects you need to implement (for example upgrades) and some break/fix work you need to manage. This means that you will also need an IT support partner on your team.

IT support providers can help with anything and everything which isn’t regular care and maintenance. These days they are probably more focused on project work than the break/fix support which used to be their core function. That’s because effective proactive maintenance, as offered by managed IT services providers often vastly reduces the need for break/fix support. That said, it can’t guarantee to eliminate problems, hence the importance of having a good IT support partner on your side.

For completeness, if you are using IT support for project work, then you should be able to determine what sort of support you are likely to need and for how long and to budget accordingly. As break/fix support is reactive, it has to be billed in arrears, and in theory, your liability is unlimited. It can therefore be sensible to be prepared with sinking funds and/or insurance. In fact, you may even be able to get insurance from your IT support provider.

3. IT helpdesk providers can keep end-users happy

In an ideal world, all IT infrastructure should always work all the time and all end-users should be educated and empowered to find out anything they need to know about how IT works by doing their own research. Many organizations, even SMBs, are actually pretty close to achieving that ideal world, but there is still a need for users to be able to report issues, ask questions, and/or make requests for service and in many cases the best way to manage these is through a well-run IT helpdesk.

While it may seem like an IT helpdesk should be the easiest IT service for an SMB to run in-house, in actual fact it can be a significant challenge. Even first-line IT staff are in high demand and it is important to retain them for as long as possible as they need to be trained on how to route tickets appropriately. It can therefore be much easier, and more cost-effective, to use a professional IT helpdesk service provider.

If you’d like to speak to a reputable and experienced IT services provider in Elk Grove, please click here now to contact Aperio.IT.

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