Imagine that your network is experiencing a surge in activity. You decide to respond by investing in infrastructure. However, weeks later, the surge drops since it was an anomaly, and you return to normal activity levels. Your business is now stuck paying for an investment they didn’t really need.

Companies often face fluctuations in demand, forcing them to consider infrastructure investments long before they’re ready. That’s why many businesses are weighing the pros and cons of setting up their own on-premise network services or leveraging a managed service provider. Instinct tells us that it will be cheaper to run our own services, but the numbers tell a different story. A 2021 report by Mordor Intelligence found that businesses that use managed services can save between 25% and 45% on their IT budget. So, what contributes to the lower IT costs of managed services?

Save Money by Offloading IT Management

Every job in your company has an associated cost; it may come from employee time, hardware, software and other tools used to get the work done. IT management requires a combination of all these factors to operate smoothly, and teams that leverage managed network services can save money in seven key ways:

1. Less downtime. Managed network service providers have large amounts of IT infrastructure in addition to the people and processes to ensure system continuity. They also have system redundancies (a significant capital expenditure) that work seamlessly so that users don’t realize when a server or system crashes on the provider’s side.
2. Constant monitoring. In conjunction with redundant systems, these providers monitor their systems 24/7 using IT professionals and specialized software. For a company to achieve this level of monitoring would be costly and difficult given the market’s overall need for IT professionals.
3. Costs as an operating expense. Setting up your own network services requires substantial upfront hardware investments, which must also be maintained and secured. In contrast, managed services are charged as a flat fee in which the provider takes care of the people, power, hardware, and software required to provide the service.
4. Increased focus on the core business. Today most companies require some type of IT department, but running all your IT infrastructure on-premise will significantly increase hiring needs. Using managed services allows you to keep team efforts primarily focused on your core business, including the talent you try to acquire.
5. Scale with ease. Whether you are a small or large company, managed services can scale to your needs. You can scale up and down based on current demand without making costly changes to your infrastructure.
6. Speed of implementation. Implementing new technology takes research, time, and labor. All of which can slow down operations and distract from your team’s main tasks. Managed services can be implemented in a fraction of the time as on-premise solutions and be easily added to additional departments.
7. Unified software solutions. Mismatched software solutions limit the potential for sharing data and extracting insights within your team. They also often lead to duplicative work and lower productivity. Managed service providers offer unified software platforms that allow you to manage everything from a single place and upgrade solutions without needing to upgrade your underlying infrastructure.

Offload IT Management by Leveraging Managed Network Services

Your company’s network infrastructure should help your team get work done instead of hindering productivity and frustrating your people. You can use managed network services to offload your day-to-day network operations and maintenance responsibility. This includes installing, monitoring, and maintaining network hardware, managing security, and troubleshooting any issues that arise.

At OneNeck, we help our customers lower costs through managed network services. We provide the expertise you need to deploy efficient and fully secure network hardware — analyzing usage trends to help you plan for the future. If you’d like to learn more about the ROI of managed network services, talk to our team today.