Maintaining an in-house IT team often creates a competitive business advantage. The benefits are clear. Your team receives the fastest possible IT response, and you have an expert right down the hall. They may even be able to handle some procurement and upgrade projects.
However, like any employee, not all IT professionals are equal. In fact, they shouldn’t be.
For example, there’s almost no reason for companies to have a Registered Communications Distribution Designer (RCDD) on staff. The needs and required salary don’t make sense. The same is true for a Chief Technical Officer. It’s unlikely many companies would see the ROI of such a role. But the majority of companies would surely benefit from both staff members, as well as many other IT roles.
What’s a company to do? How can it meet their IT needs while also justifying their IT staffing budget? The solution is Managed IT services.
What Is Managed IT Services?
Think of Managed IT services like Lyft or mass transit. They thrive because many people need to get places, but not enough to justify owning a car. Those people turn to on-demand transportation options when they need to go further than walking or biking allows. Options such as Lyft and mass transit fill the gaps in their transportation needs. It empowers travel without incurring a car loan, insurance, or gas/charging payments.
The benefit of reduced payments is precisely what Managed IT services offer to businesses. You contract Managed IT Services only when needed. It perfectly augments what your in-house resources can do in times of need, change, or when seeking deep expertise.
Managed IT contracts are very flexible to fit the moment. Some companies opt for an annual contract with a set number of hours per month. Others use Managed IT on a project basis, such as migrating systems to the cloud or building a new facility. Others contract specific roles, like a CTO to shepherd significant transformations.
Managed IT services put the business in control, enabling them to optimize their IT investment without wasting overhead on underutilized staff assets.
How Managed IT Services Can Work For You
Specialized Skills
The primary advantage of Managed IT Services is providing on-demand access to specialized skills. Even top in-house IT teams typically require outside support when addressing questions about cloud architecture, network segmentation, and compliance frameworks such as SOC 2 or HIPAA. Managed IT Services are also key players when migrating a legacy system to a new enterprise platform.
Contracting for specialized skills not only delivers better solutions but also allows in-house teams to stay focused on their regular duties. That way, nothing gets missed or goes unaddressed, ensuring the smoothest possible operations even during times of change.
Security
There’s almost no such thing as too much protection when a single attack or mistake can cripple a system for days. Many times, Managed IT Services are contracted to provide an additional layer of monitoring, threat detection, and penetration testing.
Failover and Recovery
In many cases, the Managed IT Services partner is contracted to be on call 24/7 to activate emergency recovery protocols. If your security measures are ever breached, they will engage pre-designed and maintained redundancy and failover technology. Having this type of Managed IT Service arrangement in place can transform days-long outages into momentary disruptions.
Fractional CTO
According to Salary.com, the median salary for a CTO in the US is $309,000 a year. For smaller companies, the salary is still quite substantial, reaching $180,000 per year, according to Payscale. That’s beyond the budget of many companies’ HR departments. However, the need for CTO guidance persists. With Managed IT Service, you can contract a fractional CTO. That’s a professional who consults on an as-needed basis for projects such as developing an IT roadmap, vendor selection and negotiation, infrastructure scaling, and digital transformation.
IT Health Auditing
Your IT infrastructure and devices are akin to a human body. Like you, it benefits from annual check-ups and examinations. Because technology advances rapidly, your IT department should conduct quarterly audits and reports. What do these audits include? Things that can easily go unnoticed, like expiring software, system health, security protocols, OS versions, network performance, and more.
What Does the Perfect IT Team Look Like?
The ideal may not be as hard to achieve as you think. It starts with having some on-staff, in-house IT members. You’ll want people to handle the easy, day-to-day IT work. As noted, their response time is superior, and the cost will likely be easily justified for the volume of work they handle. In some cases, this person is actually part of a Managed IT Services arrangement. There are IT partners that place their own technicians at your locations on a full-time basis. It saves your HR from having to find, interview, and hire the right candidate.
With an in-house person in place, you’ll want to formalize a partnership with a Managed IT Services partner. Look for one who is well-equipped to handle your locations, has remote service desks, a robust request ticketing system, plus specialized staffing capabilities, such as RCDDs. You’ll want to create an arrangement that leverages your in-house talent and addresses all your higher-level IT needs.
Finally, working with your Managed IT Services partner helps you to assess if, when, and what projects would require a fractional CTO role. Managed IT Services allows you to contract a fractional CTO on an on-demand basis until your organization grows large enough to warrant hiring one full-time. It’s our advice that every organization start with a fractional CTO, even if it’s just to lead the search and help you vet full-time CTO candidates.
Ready to Future-Proof Your Corporate IT Team?
Having the right IT team in place is critical for future-proofing your business operations. Identifying the best way to ensure you have an IT team built for success is by working with an expert. Matrix-NDI solves the challenges of IT by unlocking the full ROI of your IT infrastructure. We design and install networks built for maximum speed and perfectly matched to bandwidth demands.
Why work with Matrix-NDI?
With on-staff Registered Communications Distribution Designers (RCDDs), coast-to-coast service coverage, and partnerships with leading data networking providers—including Extreme Networks, Nile, and others—Matrix-NDI delivers the expertise and reach to support your technology goals. We invite you to connect with us to see how our expertise, partnerships, and national reach can help solve your challenges.
Contact Matrix-NDI to get started. Let’s build smarter, safer, more connected spaces — together.
