Tag: co-managed it

  • Is it time to call in the reinforcements? 5 benefits to co-managed IT services

    Is it time to call in the reinforcements? 5 benefits to co-managed IT services

    For many small to medium sized businesses, they have one go-to person for their IT needs. This person knows the business inside and out and whether they were in IT to start or just discovered they had an affinity for it, they are a reliable resource the rest of your team depends on when something goes wrong.

    The downside is they’re just one person. It’s a minor disruption if they call out sick or take a vacation, if they were to quit that minor disruption turns major. It’s tenuous to rely on a single person for such an important task alone.

    Even if you ran your business for years without anyone being in charge of IT, how dependent were you on technology at that point compared to now? Year over year, spending on technology for small businesses continues to grow (the average being between $10,000 to $49,000 for per year).

    Technology spending is an investment you make in your businesses future and having reliable support to utilize that investment is key to making sure that the effort, time and money spent on it is not wasted.

    The employee you have in charge of technology for your business is also an investment, and they may have felt they needed more help and support as your business has grown but may have felt unsure how to make that request. It’s difficult for employees to let their bosses know they feel overwhelmed without worrying that it’ll lead to them appearing inadequate.

    The truth is for most businesses, technology has a lot of moving parts. You most likely have a team that relies on devices to do their job and if multiple things go wrong simultaneously, one single person can’t be in two or more places at once. That’s a lot of pressure for your IT person, and a lot of downtime for the employees stuck waiting for their turn.

    You also can’t expect one person to be good at all things, your IT person may be great at fixing the company website when it’s down or troubleshooting network errors, but you could be calling in reinforcements already (at an exorbitant rate) when something outside their wheelhouse is on the fritz.

    We’ve spent a lot of time talking about why you should consider co-managed IT without outright saying it, but here’s are 5 ways co-managed IT can help your business:

    1. Access to 24/7 emergency support. It’s unfair to expect your IT person to be on call around the clock 24/7 365, but with a co-managed solution emergency support is usually included.
    2. Access to a variety of skills. A co-managed solution will have a team of people who have a varied skill set, so when you call in for support, you’ll have the right person for the job the first time (minimizing your downtime).
    3. Access to software solutions. Your co-managed provider will have access to software solutions that would otherwise be too expensive to procure for your business alone, but because they’re providing it for many clients the cost for you is much more reasonable (or even free).
    4. More hands-on deck. As we said, your IT person can’t be in two places at once. If they’re knee deep in something, we can be that extra help that you need, and they’ll appreciate.
    5. Much less expensive then bringing on an additional person. Finally, the cost of a co-managed plan is going to be much less expensive than the cost of hiring an additional person.

    Co Managed IT Services

    In fact, at Valley Techlogic we have a plan tailored for co-managed situations. If many of the things in this article rang true for you and you’d like to learn more, simply book a consultation with us today.

    Looking for more to read? We suggest these other articles from our site.

    This article was powered by Valley TechLogic, an IT service provider in Atwater, CA. You can find more information at https://www.valleytechlogic.com/ or on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/valleytechlogic/ . Follow us on Twitter at https://x.com/valleytechlogic.

  • Your IT Guy Quit, Now What?

    Your IT Guy Quit, Now What?

    Your relationship with your IT person can be a somewhat fragile dichotomy, sure you’re friendly with them and they’re probably a great person (you chose/hired them after all).

    But for many small business owners they couldn’t really tell you what this person does beyond making the computers “work”. You hired them for their skills and those skills should exist outside the realm of what you could manage for your own IT (though many owners try).

    So, if they quit, you’re suddenly in the lurch. You have all these systems that were being maintained by one individual that are now in limbo as you try to figure out what to do next, perhaps even trying to entice them to come back.

    For any new person you bring on, the relics of your old IT person may haunt them for them for the entirety of their tenure with you. When you’re just one person trying to manage many systems and users, documenting as you go can feel like a lost cause – especially during the busy times.

    That’s also supposing the split was amicable. If it was not, the damage can be difficult to recover from. We always recommend business owners maintain access to their own systems and never let themselves be completely cut off from the admin side of things no matter how capable your IT person is. Recovering those accounts can be difficult to impossible depending on the system in question.

    That leads us to our list of the top 4 things you should do as soon as your IT person quits.

    First 4 things to do when your IT person quits

    As we say in our infographic, leaving the entirety of your technology support to one person can be a dicey proposition. That’s where our co-managed solution comes in.

    In a co-managed scenario, you keep your IT guy, and we work with him to offload some of the tasks that may be bogging him down day to day. We also will bring our tools that we have honed and perfected across nearly two decades in the business to improve your processes.

    This includes better documentation, better reporting, and just overall better transparency so you as a business owner can have a bird’s eye view into this process that is so important to the continued success of your business.

    The added bonus to lightening their load is that they can then focus on activities that will move your business forward, such as projects that had been on hold because there just wasn’t time or activities that can actually grow your business.

    For example, they can address aging hardware issues that there just hasn’t been time for in the past that are holding your business back and representing a cybersecurity threat. We can even help with sourcing. Technology is a necessary component in the success of any business no matter what category or size – if yours is stuck in the past it’s going to curtail your efforts to grow your business.

    If your IT person just quit and you’re thinking you would rather have a competent IT team managing your technology, we have a plan for that as well. Our managed IT department plan is all encompassing and includes all of the support you will need, 24/7. You can learn more by taking a quick consultation with us here.


    Looking for more to read? We suggest these tech articles from the last week.

    This article was powered by Valley TechLogic, an IT service provider in Atwater, CA. You can find more information at https://www.valleytechlogic.com/ or on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/valleytechlogic/ . Follow us on Twitter at https://x.com/valleytechlogic.