Why Accounting Departments Love Managed IT Services

If you’re looking for an outsourced IT provider, perhaps the best thing you can ask a prospective company is how they can save you money and improve the flexibility of your budget. Break-fix IT can place an unneeded burden on your organization, but managed IT allows you to save money and improve operations all at the same time.

What Is an As-a-Service Offering?
Outsourced IT can help you reduce the overall expenditures of your business by implementing proactive management principles. This service is paid for on a month-by-month basis, kind of like other utilities such as water, electric, Internet, and so on. You might notice how these services are a bit easier to budget for, as they become predictable rather than unexpected by turning a capital expense into an operational expense. This allows for greater cost savings and budget flexibility in the long run.

The great part of outsourced IT is that it can take any part of your organization’s IT infrastructure and make it into an “as a service” offering. This is when you avoid up-front costs for IT maintenance and services by paying more manageable monthly payments, making them much more affordable. This allows your business the oversight to better plan for unexpected payments or repairs.

Here are three great examples of how managed service offerings can help your business realize its full potential.

Software as a Service
When you first started your business, you might have purchased a full, one-time license of each piece software per workstation. This can be a pretty expensive one-time investment, but what happens when a new version comes out and you need to upgrade? The issue with this approach is that it can get pricey, and might cause budget-minded businesses to put the upgrade on hold. Now you are running out-of-date software, which could lead to a issues. When something does go wrong, you’ll have to make the hard choice to purchase the upgrades AND resolve whatever problem the older software may have caused. Software as a Service aims to take away these issues by providing subscriptions for your mission-critical software, and most software providers keep the updates coming while you are subscribed.

One great example of this is Microsoft Office 365. Just pay for a certain number of users and each of them will have access to the software they need to perform their day-to-day tasks. Since Office 365 is a cloud-based software solution, users can access these apps from any approved device, improving the mobility and flexibility.

Hardware as a Service
If you’ve ever purchased hardware such as workstations, server units, or network components, you know that they can be very expensive. Hardware as a Service (HaaS) gets around this problem by leasing hardware solutions to companies as a service. This makes it easy to implement hardware refreshes from time to time, as replacing server units or workstations that will fail in the near future is much easier than dealing with the fallout of losing data. With Hardware as a Service, you can get all of the technology you need without the huge upfront costs, while maintaining the integrity of your network infrastructure.

Infrastructure as a Service
IaaS allows your business to take advantage of the many benefits of Software as a Service while allowing them to span your entire computing infrastructure. Thanks to the cloud, you can host your organization’s entire IT infrastructure in the cloud (or at least a part of it). The main goal of this is to virtualize your assets and minimize the amount of hardware that you have to maintain in-house. This can free up space in your office, cut down on energy costs, and create a more efficient network for your staff, as they can then access their work from anywhere with an Internet connection.

The greatest benefit that these services provide is clear and immediate cost savings. If your management is wasting valuable time and resources managing its own technology, remember these outsourced services and the many benefits that they provide. If your organization wants to take the next step toward securing a profitable future, reach out to us at (206) 895-5595.