Small and medium-sized business owners make a lot of decisions that impact their staff, clients, vendors, and business goals. From financing to legal support to a whole lot more, each shapes the future of your business.

Many of those decisions relate to technology, and ultimately, you have to decide how you will utilize the technology, applications, and equipment you invest in. You can manage everything yourself or outsource some or all of that effort to a managed IT provider.

To help you with those considerations, let’s look specifically at how a managed IT provider can assist Omaha and Lincoln businesses with operations, costs, and growth.

Uptime

Downtime is expensive and sometimes devastating to smaller companies. How does your IT MSP help?

First, they design and build a robust IT infrastructure that performs well for daily operations with fewer failure points and less downtime as a product of smart design. Combine that with regular maintenance and scheduled updates to keep infrastructure in top condition.

Pair it with a response team that can quickly analyze and overcome unexpected disruptions, and you can absolutely maximize uptime. In addition, an MSP is constantly monitoring network equipment performance and is notified through alerts when a piece of equipment is not functioning.

Creating even more value, your MSP can help you cultivate reliable vendors with access to experts and support that will lend expertise. In addition, redundancy is available with multiple vendor relationships. This prevents overreliance on a single vendor — diversifying your resources. For example, if an internet outage occurs, failover is set up with a second internet company so that your business continues performing at a level required by your clients.

Automation

Stable infrastructure is a great starting point, but your Omaha IT provider can improve operations by providing automation tools.

The tools and technology MSPs use automate processes and tasks that would otherwise be done manually. Routine maintenance tasks such as patching, application upgrades, and testing are automated. What used to take many hours of work in a midsize business is now deployed after hours in minutes.

Cybersecurity is another example of IT automation in action. Enterprise-level tools and resources are available to midsize businesses through outsourced IT providers. Tools are AI-powered to prevent, detect, threat-hunt, and remediate threats across all user endpoints, containers, cloud workloads, and IoT devices. Modern automation is defending your business quicker, on a larger scale, and more accurately.

The examples go on, whether it be digitizing documents, increasing the speed of customer service processes across your entire business, or deploying AI to gather data and documents at a speed never seen before.

Incident Response

While you expect your IT support in Omaha and Lincoln to keep things running smoothly, disruptions do happen. This is another area where IT providers assist.

Help desk support can fix day-to-day problems when they arise, and a good IT partner will provide consistent, rapid support for these cases.

Some incidents require a different response, something well-thought-out and planned in advance. Your managed IT provider will help you develop a comprehensive response plan and take part in executing the plan as it relates to the business technology.

An incident response plan maps out the steps to take when a security breach, natural disaster, or utility problem occurs. It helps you loop your IT provider in faster and ensures that everyone is following the proper steps to restore normal operations as quickly as possible.

Incident response planning covers every facet of response, including the following:

• Informing affected parties
• Containing threats
• Establishing safety
• Restoring operations
• Strategizing to prevent a future incident

Budget

Budgeting provides its own set of challenges, and IT costs can easily throw a wrench into your budget. Thankfully, a good IT support provider in Omaha can help you with this. They will not only provide a budget that includes the cost of your renewals and subscriptions but also outline costs for any technology projects that you want to accomplish that year.

When you have a well-thought-out budget and can anticipate upgrades and changes needed to meet your business goals, you are well on your way to preventing excess spending.  With a budget in hand, you can keep your IT costs below your cash flow and ensure your business is taking advantage of the technology.

A reliable budget also improves your ability to perform cost analysis on your IT expenditures — ensuring you get the ROI you want from your regular IT support and technology projects.

Personnel

Good technology improves the value of work done in your business, and that’s a great start, but you can get even more. Good IT support in Omaha also improves working conditions. You can reduce turnover, lower training costs, and have happier, better-performing employees.

At the same time, you can save money on labor costs related directly to IT. You’re outsourcing some or all of your tech support, and that’s much cheaper in terms of doing your own hiring, paying salaries, and dealing with turnover. You gain access to high-level tech expertise without shouldering the costs of recruiting and cultivating such talent.

Strategic Planning

Strategy is where you get the most value from your IT partner’s experience. Your Omaha IT provider works with other businesses and has been for years. They have vertical experience in your industry.

While they may specialize in technology, their experience with other clients in your field offers them industry insights that you might miss.

Partnering with an MSP for their vertical experience, you can set growth expectations, and they can draft a plan that keeps your technology in line with your goals. They can show you uses for technology that you likely did not consider, and they can demonstrate how it will impact your operations and bottom line in clear terms.

Adding even more value, they can educate you and your staff to ensure best results with any tech changes.

Future-Proofing

Technology eventually becomes outdated however the good news is that strategic planning is future-proofing. Following an annual IT plan is how your IT provider schedules technology upgrades and replacements over the coming months and years.

Future-proofing allows you to implement those upgrades often for a reduced cost and with minimal interruptions to your business operations. It forms another aspect of cost efficiency that helps you gain more value from your relationship with technology.

Providing Managed IT Services for Omaha and Lincoln

When you want your technology to positively drive operations, costs, and growth, you need the right provider. We can help! If you run a business in Omaha, Lincoln, and surrounding areas, contact us today to discuss your business goals and see how we can become a valuable partner.