Selecting the Best Solution to Meet Your IT Support Needs

Selecting the Best Solution to Meet Your IT Support Needs
By Sadie Hawkins

 

Consolidating your IT Support can be a fight. It all comes down to one decision: a series of suppliers or a single provider to manage your needs? Do you opt to go ten rounds with a different boxer every time, or do you pick a single opponent? Each has its benefits - but for some businesses, there's a clear winner - and here we weigh the options.

Managing your IT Support in-house

Some firms choose to build in-house teams to manage the workload. A dedicated department knows their opponent. They can design, build, support and manage systems to your exact specifications and work to a defined strategy for on-going maintenance. This is an ideal solution for larger firms with deep pockets and high head counts. But it's beyond the capability of most organisations. It's time-consuming and costly, and lateral personnel moves can leave you stranded.

Choosing a single supplier

Many now choose to consolidate all of their IT support requirements in to one support provider and measure them with clear service-level agreements. Instead of battling multiple vendors with their competing products and styles, you go all ten rounds with the same supplier. You get to know them and they get to know you: it's a match. This approach is especially useful for IT infrastructures built with multiple vendor products needing third party, out of warranty and post-warranty support services. This solution offers the following benefits:

? It reduces the administrative overhead of managing contracts with multiple vendors and makes sure support services are effectively managed externally at all times.

? It guarantees certain levels of service with penalties for non-performance. This can reduce downtime from the finger pointing that can happen with a multi-support approach.

? It provides a broad range of trusted, proven hardware and software to meet your needs, based upon the tested packages provided from your single support service.

? It mitigates manufacturer's reluctance to engage in after-sales support, placing responsibility with your support provider for on-going service maintenance.

? It provides a single gateway and point of contact for any issues, freeing up your IT decision-makers to focus upon their business priorities.

? It enables more proactive customer service for all of your IT support needs, in comparison to the disparate SLAs offered through a range of vendors.

? It is more cost-effective to outsource your support to a single provider, as they have the expertise and economies of scale based on a holistic view of your requirements.

If you are seeking a way of reducing your IT support costs and streamlining your processes, opting for a managed support service could be the answer. It's an ideal approach for those who don't have a dedicated in-house IT team to administer multiple vendors allowing the IT team to get on with its day job.

Orange Information Systems Group, understand the IT Support challenges businesses face and have developed a support service that doesn't pull any punches. Their Managed IT Support Services meet the needs of businesses with hardware and software from multiple vendors.