How Important are 24/7 IT Support Services for Businesses?

Deadlines? Everybody has them in one form or another. Do you? To meet a deadline, do you find yourself working after hours or on weekends? Most of us depend on access to the office network even if we’re working from home on a Sunday night. This is exactly where 24/7 IT support services can be a crucial factor.

You have an important proposal to submit tomorrow morning, but something has gone wrong and you can’t access your files on the office network. You look at the clock: it’s 10:15 on Sunday night and you need help.

The problem is: your company has an in-house IT guy, and you try calling him at home, but he’s not there, meaning nobody can help you.

What do you do? Miss the deadline for your proposal? Lose the deal? Even as the boss, you don’t want to look like an idiot in front of your staff.

BUT: What if you had reliable 24/7 IT support services?

Welcome to ITFIRM.COM. We know how business works these days: much is remote and much happens during off hours. We have been accommodating business scheduling like this for many years.

With our truly available services, it doesn’t matter if you need us during regular work hours or at Midnight on New Year’s Day – we are here for you. A full complement of well trained and certified technicians are on call for you.

The benefits of using an IT Managed Services Provider (MSP) like us go well beyond convenience and reliability, it can also give you better service at a lower cost than an in-house IT person. Unlike ‘Joe the computer guy,’ we don’t take vacations, personal days or even weekends off. You don’t have to provide healthcare and other benefits for us, either.

How much savings?

Compare the costs:

The average per-user cost for the entire gamut of MSP benefits runs about $100 per user per month.

15 users x $100 = $1500/mo. / $18,000 per year 60 users x $100 = $6,000/mo. /$72,000 per year

Compare the annual 60-user cost of $72,000 for an MSP to the annual cost of employing a fully qualified

internal IT manager:

Salary:               $75,000 +  Benefits:          $21,726        

Total:                 $93,726

Bear in mind that this is the annual cost for only one IT person (who leaves at 5PM and gets all those days off).

In addition, there are the costs of establishing in-house IT: the hardware/software setup and maintenance costs (depending on the situation and number of end-users, figure on average between $10,000 to $30,000 dollars for the initial setup and ongoing licensing and subscription costs), and you are paying over $100,000 dollars for one person who works 9-5 Monday Through Friday.

With an MSP, you not only get 24/7 IT support services, you get a fixed budget for an entire team that will ALWAYS be on the job – and will know more and be much faster than your internal IT person. The MSP will never take sick, personal, and vacation days off, you will never have EDD unemployment claims or HR difficulties. In effect, you are John Connor protected by The Terminator of IT: It will always be there for you and will never, ever stop.

Think of it this way: If you want a donut, you don’t need to buy a bakery.

The Choice:

While it’s wise to be prepared, nobody likes to dwell on what failure looks like. Let’s go back to your Sunday night emergency and examine the choice between failure and success.

Failure:

This is not a happy picture. You can’t complete your proposal, and even when you get to the office on Monday, you don’t have enough time. So, you either try to postpone the delivery of the proposal, except it's 9 AM and the prospective client will be in your office at 10, or you throw something together, taking the very real risk of looking unprofessional and unprepared.

None of these alternatives cast your organization in a positive light for your potential client. You not only lose the deal, but negative comments about prospective vendors have a way of going around your business community.

Success:

You call your MSP (ITFIRM.COM) on Sunday night, they remote right in and fix the issue, and you not only complete the proposal, but get a great night’s restful sleep as well.

You meet the client at 10 the next morning with both you and your proposal looking sharp and confident, and in short order, you close the sale on a new client. Let’s recap with that initial question: How Important are 24/7 IT Support Services for Businesses? Extremely.