Individuals and businesses create and store about 2.5 quintillion bytes of data each day. By 2025, this figure will likely rise to 463 exabytes of data. Since an exabyte is a billion gigabytes, business owners can expect their volume of data and information to rapidly increase this year.
Hiring an IT support consultant can help you manage this growing amount of data.
Here, we’re going to discuss how managed IT services and support can benefit your business. Read on to learn how outsourcing to an IT support consultant can assist in data protection, security, and productivity.
What Is an IT Support Consultant?
For those new to the world of tech, IT stands for ‘information technology.’ An IT support consultant tells the businesses that hire them how to best use their technologies. They do this by determining how technology can help them meet their business goals.
The overall role of a IT support consultant is to boost your overall IT system infrastructure and business performance. The goal is to get rid of the gap between staff and technical teams. This lets everyone adjust the ways they work together and use both software and hardware.
In addition to telling businesses how tech solutions can help reach their objectives, IT support consultants provide tips and tricks to maximize productivity. They develop business strategies. They choose and implement both software and hardware to optimize the development of those strategies.
IT support consultants also find tech-related problems and come up with solutions for any issues they identify. This ensures that your computers and networks will always be running efficiently. You’ll also get the newest technology as it gets rolled out, so you won’t need to worry about falling behind competitors.
The Types of IT Support Consultants
IT consulting encompasses a diverse range of actions and activities. That’s why there are several different job roles that a consultant can fall into. You’re going to hire an expert based on your specific needs and goals.
Systems analysts are one of the most common IT consultant types. These individuals collaborate with SMBs to create an IT strategy. They follow the strategy, create protocols, and design IT solutions that meet all of your business demands.
Business analysts are very specific IT professionals who develop a full grasp of the industry that you work in. Instead of figuring out how to use technology, they’ll spend time analyzing data and determining your business requirements. They can then outline your business’s tech needs and implement actionable strategies with the help of a network engineer.
Network engineers have high technical proficiency levels and design the networks that businesses deploy and use. They also help manage VoIP services, cloud migration, and data protection.
Network administrators and tech support experts take the baton from engineers after they design and implement a new network. These roles offer assistance and troubleshooting measures for pre-existing, pre-defined networks. They manage both on-site and cloud-based servers while conducting cybersecurity audits and enhancing data protection.
The Role of an IT Support Consultant
IT support consultant roles will largely depend on the type of consulting expert you hire. However, there are some important tasks that all IT consultant types manage.
All IT consultants’ main job is to communicate and collaborate with the businesses that hire them. They talk about your goals and pain points with you to better understand your business. They’ll give you advice on how to optimize your IT systems so that your teams can collaborate better and work more efficiently.
They must recognize the scope of your project, understand your business principles, and implement procedures that work.
Other services that all IT consultants offer include:
- Monitoring company networks and devices
- Performing regular cybersecurity audit exams
- Corresponding with software engineers
- Being the middleman between engineers and support specialists
- Finding potential issues with apps and systems
- Detecting network vulnerabilities
- Fixing problems and vulnerabilities as they arise
- Coming up with workarounds for pain points so that you can streamline your tech
In the end, they aim to maximize your ROI, improve your security, and keep you compliant with business or industry regulations.
The Benefits of an IT Support Consultant
Clearly, IT consultants have many roles in small to medium business’s daily operations. You’ll get expert IT support, timely services, and better business outcomes through well-optimized processes.
However, this is simply the tip of the iceberg. An IT consulting firm can benefit you by saving money as well.
Instead of hiring an in-house IT technician, a consultant is an outsourced position. This means that the IT consultant will work for an outside firm that you hire to collaborate with you. You won’t need to hire another full-time employee who requires a salary, health benefits, 401K, or PTO pay.
You also won’t need to contend with training and onboarding new people. IT consultants are already highly trained and experienced when you work with a high-quality managed IT firm. This means you can redirect your energies toward growing your bottom line rather than engaging in unnecessary training.
Finding Areas of Improvement
Experienced IT professionals can easily find specific areas where you could improve your business technology. They understand various technical environments and will therefore have broad perspectives about business technology and the prospects that it offers.
Since outsourced IT firms have seen tech in various businesses, they have a lot of expertise and perspective. They’ll be able to easily reach into their knowledge reserves to identify what solutions can best improve your processes, workflows, and productivity.
They can then implement the best software and hardware to help you streamline operations.
Additionally, experienced IT management firms have a lot of professionals in their arsenal. This means that they have a well-rounded team that can collaborate to identify and resolve issues. You’ll get insight from many different perspectives and can integrate multiple viewpoints for quick problem resolution.
A Scalable Solution
One massive benefit of outsourcing IT is its scalable nature.
If you had in-house IT professionals, you would need to pay them the same rates at all times. This is true even during months when you have low IT support needs. You don’t want to cut positions you’ll need later, so this can result in you wasting a lot of money that could go into other areas of your business.
An outsourced IT support consultant solves this problem because you can scale up and down easily. You can call in a lot of professional help one month, get it, and then pay for very little support the next month. It’s also easy to ask to cut down on servers and network operations when you’re not using as much data, so you can also save money by scaling your files.
Improving Your Security
Many businesses don’t know that the average cost of one company data breach is $4.45 million.
An IT consultant provides data protection measures. They install firewalls and MFA features onto both your machines and your network. They track data and trends for abnormalities and work to keep unauthorized users out.
You’ll also get a cybersecurity audit regularly. This often means that an ethical hacker will simulate a data breach to see where simulated malware can penetrate your system. They’ll identify vulnerabilities and patch them up so that real cybercriminals can’t get onto your network via these holes.
Plus, if you ever have any security-related issues, you’ll always be able to contact the consultant and make sure that everything is in order.
How to Choose Managed IT Services That Work
IT support consultants don’t provide a one-size-fits-all approach. You’ll need to customize your experience based on your needs. This means contemplating the best ways to:
- Streamline organization
- Improve workplace collaboration
- Strengthen security methods
- Boost software management
- Improve how you manage hardware
Customizing your IT support plan can ensure that you get insight into the top options for you. It also means that you can get assistance based on your specific needs.
To make this work, however, you’ll need to choose high-quality IT support consultant services.
Make sure to select a firm with a lot of experience and expertise. You also want their professionals to have a wide range of service offerings so that you can benefit from multiple viewpoints and diverse ideas. This will get you a better holistic IT plan.
Transparent communication and fast response times are also important. You don’t want to contend with downtime because of unresolved network errors. In some worst-case scenarios, long wait periods for responses also could mean a security breach.
Cost-effective and scalable solutions also need to be a priority. You don’t want to lose money because you have difficulty scaling. Being flexible should be as simple as one conversation with your consultant.
Get Started With Outsourced IT
Now that you know the role of an IT support consultant for your business, it’s time to begin the process of hiring outsourced professionals.
Vertical IT Solutions is committed to providing California SMBs with VoIP, managed IT, cloud services, and expert consulting support. We’ll monitor and manage your IT infrastructure so you can relax and conduct business while trusting in your infrastructure and security.
Schedule a consultation to discuss your specific IT support consultant needs with our experienced team and learn more about data protection, cloud migration, and beyond.