Thinking about IT fixes is always painful. Setting up the various services and systems that keep your business running—much less keeping them up—can be a vague and intimidating time commitment, which is why so many businesses choose to have IT professionals take the reins. Still, the choice remains to select managed IT services in Irvine, or to simply take what we can affectionately call the break-fix approach. Let’s look closer at the step-by-step difference between these two approaches.
The break-fix approach:
- Something goes wrong
- You run screaming to your IT people, who, if it’s a larger company, will open a ticket, and they get to your urgent issue when they can.
- Once the team understands the problem, they are dispatched to the area, or begin trouble shooting the problem remotely.
- Eventually the problem is diagnosed and eventually fixed.
- You get billed, including hourly charges as applicable.
Now let’s compare to a managed-service solution:
- Something goes wrong.
- Your account manager is notified right away thanks to their surveillance software.
- Impact on your system is either mitigated, or completely avoided, before you contact them, or even notice the problem.
- Your service provider deals with the problem, likely remotely, or you’re notified that some onsite work will be needed.
- Cost of addressing the problem is included in the monthly cost.
Proactive or Reactive?
The crux of this decision rests on just how long you can reasonably stand to have your systems down in a crisis. If you’re relying on the break-fix approach, you can expect for it to be hours or even days before the problem is resolved. You may argue that you can save money using break-fix, because you’re only paying when a problem needed to be solved. This doesn’t take into account the cost to your business of having your network go down.
At its heart, this is reactive problem solving. Implicit is the hope that something won’t go wrong, so that you don’t have to pay for it. With IT systems, the unavoidable truth is that things do go wrong, for everyone. Even if you do your best to mitigate risks, there will always be factors and variables that are outside of your control, such as malicious hacks. The break-fix approach is, in a sense, equivalent to crossing your fingers and hoping things keep working.
On the other hand, a managed IT services solution is proactive problem solving. You’re take into account that every company struggles with keeping up-to-date with IT, and it’s worth investing in now, rather than deferring costs till later. When you have a relationship with a service provider, they are able to detect and address issues before they develop into crises.
Feel like facing your IT concerns head-on? Reach out to Cloudstep to start benefitting from managed IT services in Irvine.