Let Managed Service Providers Maximize The Value Of Your It Investments

By Author: Heather Jung
Total Articles: 4
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An investment is more than just the purchase of an asset. Businesses also have an obligation to maintain their investments for as long as they retain their viability as assets. For example, a company that purchases a fleet of service vehicles will take proactive measures to ensure that they retain their professional appearance and function as effectively as possible for as long as possible. It will hire someone to wash its cars on a consistent basis and take them to the shop for occasional checkups and repairs. Failing to maintain the vehicles will result in a lot of unnecessary costs and hassles. Customers will be driven away by the unprofessional appearance of dirty cars; employees will quit rather than drive unsafe vehicles; late and missed service calls due to underperforming and broken-down autos will tarnish the company’s reputation and decrease its revenues; and the vehicles will require major and costly repairs or have to be replaced outright before the company can recoup its investment in them. As this example demonstrates, it may cost more in the short term for businesses to hire professionals to maintain and manage ...
... their assets, but the costs of neglecting an investment like a fleet of service vehicles are much higher and more difficult to overcome in the long run.

To many business owners, the importance of maintaining an investment may seem like an obvious point. For some reason, however, many businesses seem to think that this policy doesn’t extend to investments in IT assets. Perhaps viewing their IT infrastructure as more self-correcting or less important, they either do nothing or assign IT management tasks to employees with no IT training. Without proper maintenance, however, an IT infrastructure can be just as costly and damaging to a business as any other neglected asset, including vehicles, real estate, and factory equipment. For example, an IT infrastructure, if not managed by an IT professional, performs slower, is less secure and reliable, and has a shorter lifecycle. It causes an increase in data loss, downtime, and hardware costs and a reduction in productivity. An unmanaged IT infrastructure is the exact opposite of a business getting the most out of its IT assets: it only adds costs and subtracts value from the initial investment.

Fortunately, all businesses have to do to maximize their returns on their IT investments is sign up for managed services. By signing up for managed services, businesses outsource the management of their IT infrastructure to IT service companies or a computer support company. A typical managed services package includes:

-24x7x365 performance and security monitoring
-Firewall, antivirus, IPS/IDS, and content filter
-Patch management
-24x7x365 technical support (onsite, phone, email, and online chat)
-Hardware and software repair
-Business continuity planning
-Data backup

Managed service providers are staffed with experienced and highly-trained personnel and have all the latest and most effective technologies and tools. They will maximize the performance, security, and reliability of a business’s IT infrastructure. Meanwhile, it’s more cost-effective to sign up with managed service providers than hire on-site IT personnel because of the managed service providers’ superior efficiency and economies of scale (they have a steadier and more manageable flow of assignments and can dilute their operating costs amongst their significantly larger client base). With managed services from IT services companies or a Computer support company, a business’s IT infrastructure lives up to its name as an investment: i.e., something that adds greater value to a company than its initial costs.

About SACA Technologies

SACA Technologies is a leading IT services provider headquartered in Southern California. Many of its customers are located in Orange County, Los Angeles County, San Bernardino County, Riverside County, and San Diego County, though thousands of its clients are situated throughout the United States and around the world. SACA Technologies’ services include managed services, IT services, hosted services, virtualization, and sales and procurement. Learn more about how SACA Technologies can help you maximize the value of your IT investments by visiting the company at http://www.sacatech.com/.

About The Author:
Heather Jung is the Communications Coordinator for SACA Technologies. She has vast experience in writing, with a background in journalism, blog content, press release, and website content writing. She also manages the SACA Technologies social media presence.