How to Augment Your IT Support
By: core12
August 14, 2023
2:50 am
In our previous article, we covered why it’s important to augment your IT support and how it maximizes your team’s overall effectiveness. From increasing your team’s productivity to cutting costs, augmenting your IT needs frees your team so they can operate optimally.
But what are some of the specific ways you can augment your team? As a company that specializes in being the premier IT MSP in Atlanta, GA, we are highly familiar with the services your team can augment and the types of teams you can work with to manage those services. In this article, we offer an overview of the types of services you can augment, the types of providers you can use, and a simple guide to help you determine your needs.
Services You Can Augment
Depending on what your internal IT team’s needs are, there are many services you can augment, including:
- Real-Time Support Services: This service helps your team so that things like slow internet speeds or forgotten passwords don’t slow the company down.
- Security Services: This type of resource ensures you have strong defenses against ransomware, hackers, and other cyber threats.
- Penetration Testing: This augmentation finds the vulnerabilities in your organization so you can eliminate potential weaknesses.
- Vulnerability Scanning: This process determines the weaknesses in your network and lists them in order of priority.
- Device & Inventory Management: This solution provides you with a thorough understanding of your IT assets.
- Employee Onboarding & Offboarding Services: This type of resource ensures a user-friendly experience for employees and sets your company up for success.
- Application & Cloud Management: This process helps you seamlessly manage remote employees and ensure everything is upgraded to the cloud.
- Application Development: This solution turns your ideas for an app into a reality so you can powerfully connect with your users and your team.
- Network & Server Management: This augmentation manages the resources you need to ensure your business runs at the optimal speed and your infrastructure is strong.
- Procurement & Provisioning Services: This service ensures you stay within your IT department’s budget and implement the best tools.
- Fractional CTO Services: This solution provides you with an expert that walks with you and helps you strategize as you face the tough decisions that come with IT leadership.
Whether you need help handling things so your IT team can complete high-level priorities or you need specialized advice to get your team to the next level, there’s a service that meets your team’s needs.
Service Providers That Provide IT Support
Many individuals and organizations provide all or some of the services we detailed above. But what type of service provider should you work with to accomplish your goals? There are a variety of providers you can utilize, depending on your business’s needs and resources.
- IT Freelancers/Contractors: They often handle specific tasks but can provide long-term support, depending on the individual. While you often save money and do not have to onboard them, keep in mind that they usually do not have a team to support your needs around the clock.
- Consulting Firms: They generally provide expertise on a specific field or a certain service, rather than all-around support. They can offer long-term advice on special initiatives and typically handle projects for a variety of clients.
- Software as a Service Providers (SaaS): These are services such as Office365, Google Workspace, or HubSpot. While these services can lighten the load on your IT team, the task of managing and organizing them to ensure they are optimally used is still left to your team.
- Managed Service Providers (MSPs): These providers partner with your existing IT team to build a long-term relationship with you, anticipate your needs, strategize for the future, and manage your technology needs. Depending on the MSP, they can provide overall support for your IT team, offer high-level expertise on projects, and optimally manage SaaS products.
Certainly, there are various ways you can augment your IT support so your team operates at its best. Whether you need assistance tightening your security, launching a new application, or determining IT initiatives, there’s a service provider that can help.
To determine what your needs are, we recommend doing the following:
- List your current needs. Then, create another list that details the things you wish your team could accomplish, but do not have the capacity to achieve yet. Organize these lists in order of priority and note the specific reasons they are not being completed.
- Take an honest look at the health and bandwidth of your IT team. What would happen with augmented support? What would happen without it?
- Finally, ask yourself these questions:
- Does my IT team need augmented support during this quarter, or do we need a long-term partnership?
- Do we need help managing our day-to-day tasks so we can tackle high-level projects, or do we need expert advice to manage a specific initiative?
- How much of our IT budget could be used for augmented support?
If you need advice on the type of IT support you need, give us a call! We would be happy to direct you to services that will maximize your team and set up your business for success.
