April 11, 2022
Are day-to-day fixes consuming your internal IT team’s resources? It’s a simple question, but the answer might not be as easy to come by. Internal IT departments are busy places. Typically, everyone is working very hard to ensure everything is operational. All of the systems that make the workday possible depend on IT keeping things up and running. We like to call it “keeping the lights on.”
What is Break/fix?
Put simply, break/fix is a reactionary model for managing business technology, where identifying solutions only happens when there’s a problem. In other words, once something breaks, then we will fix it.
The break/fix model of support was perhaps never ideal, but it was a support model that was cost-effective and reasonably met an organization’s needs when technology moved a lot more slowly, cybersecurity risks weren’t rampant and staff relied on fewer, simpler tools. The break/fix model put quite a bit of valuable business infrastructure on auto-pilot, and if anything required emergency attention, IT staff quickly put out the fire.
Putting vital programs on perpetual auto-pilot doesn’t work in an era of constant change. Now there are too many fires, and responding to all of them is completely overwhelming for many IT departments, who only have so much time in a day.
Break/fix Support Impacts Internal It
When internal IT teams have to spend their time responding to a never-ending series of emergencies, not only is that stressful for your team, they’re not able to take on projects that could actually move your business forward. Part of an IT team’s job is to keep everything in working order, and it always will be. But if fixing what’s broken eats up a significant portion of their regular workweek, it isn't a great use of company time or resources. To get a better idea of where your IT department’s time is being spent, this five-question assessment can help.
How can you help your IT members be more productive and remain focused on the larger picture of security and growth? For starters, you can seek out a technology partner who can take on the burden of day-to-day IT needs.
Get a Step Ahead With Managed Services
A Managed IT Services Provider like Marco can partner with your existing IT team in order to provide technology support and maintenance to businesses currently burdened by the break/fix model. Quite often the technology issues that repeatedly plague your IT staff can be solved. However, it may require a bit of extra poking around to identify and ultimately resolve the problem.
For example, do you have applications that lag and keep crashing during peak times? Instead of responding to each crash, a managed IT services provider might help you identify the real issue: your wireless infrastructure doesn’t have the capacity you need. These are issues today’s businesses simply cannot tolerate. And no matter how quickly your staff responds to a crash, it would free up a tremendous amount of time if those crashes simply stopped happening.
Furthermore, when it comes to cybersecurity, even fully-staffed internal IT departments typically struggle to keep up. Cybersecurity is a significant source of IT stress, and it’s one aspect of your business you can’t let slide. However, you can easily outsource it. Cybersecurity risks and countermeasures change frequently, and a good managed provider will be well-equipped to monitor both.
If you’d like to free up your IT staff so they can better help you strategize for growth, Marco’s co-managed IT services might be the ideal solution. With co-managed IT, you still get all of the benefits of having a skilled, in-house IT team that knows your business inside and out, and you’ll also get specialized help that can scale up or down.
In the world of IT, an outsider’s perspective can be surprisingly valuable, and our experts often identify unique solutions an internal team wouldn’t have otherwise considered.
