Which Walnut Creek IT Services Company Supports Local Business?

Why Does It Make Sense to Outsource IT Services?

When IT services are managed in-house, staff can quickly become overwhelmed with day-to-day tasks and lose focus, strategy and planning. This often leads to an iterative break-fix scenario that ends up eating up staff time and budget.

According to On Time Tech, a Walnut Creek IT Services Company, "Smart organizations have moved away from using break-fix services to Managed IT Services—Why? Because they want to stay up and running. The break-fix strategy no longer works for businesses today. If you still use this method of IT service, you risk downtime that can literally shut your business down. "

What Are the Advantages of a Walnut Creek IT Services Company?

Outsourcing your IT Services to a Walnut Creek IT services company helps you refocus your staff on the mission-critical tasks assigned to them. A third-party company can provide round-the-clock service and support on an as-needed basis so that you don't have to pay in-house resources to staff evening or weekend support. IT services companies provide professional training to their staff--an expense you can take advantage of without incurring the cost! This is particularly valuable to cloud-hosted systems.

How Much Does Managed IT Services Cost?

IT managed services are reputed to save companies money, but it's hard to compare it to your current costs if you don't have the figures for the various providers in the Bay Area. In-house, it's likely to be your most labor-intensive, costly line item. Running costs are a major factor for small businesses, but getting an exact quote seems to be a rather opaque process.

There's a lot of variability in services hours, availability of resources and the needs of individual clients, which means you can expect a lot of variability in prices too. It's a good idea to look at examples of low-, medium- and high-level services as a comparison to what your organization might need. (You may decide to outsource just a portion of your IT services.)

What Are the Cheapest Managed IT Services?

At the low end, monitoring services run around $75-150 per month. For this, you get a managed IT team that safeguards your server closely in case something goes wrong. They send you an alert so that your team can fix the issue. You can also pay additional fees for the monitoring team to resolve the issue and send you a detailed report of the problem.

This low-level service isn't cost-effective, but it's a start and provides around-the-clock monitoring without hiring someone in-house to do it. Unfortunately, expert help for server issues you can't resolve in-house cost from $75 to $275 per hour, depending on what's wrong. Another alternative is negotiating a retainer for a block of hours that you prepay when you sign the contract. This puts you in a vulnerable place if more than one problem occurs in a given month -- and you have to choose which fire to put out.

What's the Cost for Mid-to-High Service Levels?

This is the most popular option for small- to mid-size businesses. This approach will be different for every company but generally involves IT specialists that monitor for concerns and take the initiative to solve the problems as they arise. In many cases, a Walnut Creek IT Services Company will suggest preventive measures to keep your servers and systems running optimally.

For instance, the IT company may run daily diagnostics to maintain cybersecurity for your system's infrastructure. Hardware and software upgrades can be immediately applied to fix the problem (depending on the bounds of the contract). The period of coverage typically covers extended hours or 24-hour monitoring. These services can be a bargain if you're having major hardware or software issues since they typically come with a price per device or per user, so economies of scale are possible.

You might pay a per-device fee of :

• $100-400/server
• $50-100/workstation
• $30-75/firewall
• $15-40/switch

These are just some of the more common devices, but your pricing will obviously be based on your system architecture and your individual contract with the service provider. Common “per user” charges might be$75-175 per user, with a lot of variability for each company.

What's the Charge for the Highest Level of Managed IT Services?

For $250 per user per month, you can get comprehensive packages at the top of the spectrum. These agreements tend to be fully hosted on cloud systems. In this case, your Walnut Creek IT services company probably provides most or all of your infrastructure and you just pay a monthly usage fee. Not all companies are comfortable relinquishing this level of control over to a provider, so you really need to decide on a long term strategy before signing this contract. On the other hand, the services provided are comprehensive and let you focus on the key areas that you need to improve in to grow your market share.

How Do You Decide What Level Is Best for Your Company?

Ask yourself and other stakeholders the following questions to get an idea what range of services are optimal -- this includes considering the available budget for projects:

• Do you plan to keep your in-house IT staff?
• Do you prefer a flat fee or per-user fee?
• How complex is your environment? (This is likely to require quite a bit of documentation, done internally or through a contractor.)
• Do you need both remote and onsite services?
• Do you have an on-premises or cloud network?
• Is there a third party already managing your system that you wish to replace?