Ignore IT Support and It’ll Cost You

I came across an interesting article  that I thought did a great job of illustrating the risks associated with poor IT planning.  In the article, the author chronicles the story of a school that provided laptops to its teachers without a lot of involvement from the school system’s IT department.  Instead of involving the IT department in the purchase planning and deployment of the laptops the senior administrator simply distributed the systems and instructed the teachers to “call the IT guys if you have any problems.”  If you’d like to read the full article, click on this link.  “Who needs an IT department, anyway? from InfoWorld Top Stories

“Our principal, ‘Sue,’ said the laptops ‘increased their educational opportunities’ — all well and good, but she failed to also recognize the importance of IT involvement.”

Most of the small business owners that I talk to already know that their computer network is a living breathing animal that needs to be looked after.  That’s why  Endsight has had so much success applying its outsourced IT support approach to help local businesses maintain reliable computing resources.  Prior to cloud computing or hosting our conversation centered around the care and feeding of the core computing infrastructure (servers, routers and switches, firewalls, etc.)

The advent of cloud computing has allowed a small business owner to shift the responsibility of maintaining the servers to the application provider (hosted e-mail is a good example of this). I think this is really good news from a business perspective and I believe this trend will eventually become the dominant way computing resources to deliver.  But I also think that it also presents a risky temptation to neglect the overall care and feeding of a small business computing environment.

Once the servers have been migrated off site, the endpoint systems (PCs, Macs, and laptops) remain and still require proactive maintenance and care as well is reactive, end-user support.  The routing and switching environment also remains and it also needs to be maintained and supported.

Any failure or performance issue on these remaining, local  network elements will impact a users ability to access the hosted services.  Adopting a “just call my IT provider if there’s a problem” approach to on premise  IT support can cause real headaches and stack up significant costs in the form of productivity loss as well as the hourly rates for expensive repairs.

Endsight is helping many of our clients to take advantage of cloud computing when and where it makes sense.  In every case, we’re helping them to maintain a local support and maintenance regimen that allows them to take advantage of the cloud and at the same time maintain reliable, supported on premise networks. 

To learn more about Endsight’s “all-inclusive” approach to outsource IT support click here.