Inking in the New Year: The printing industry in 2023

Tired of downtime, slow responses and IT security concerns? Managed IT solutions can ease your stress.

While there are benefits to a company having its own in-house IT (information technology) experts, there are a variety of reasons to outsource professionals through a remote service provider.

From on-demand response to 24/7 monitoring, managed IT services can ease the workload on staff, either on the premises of a business or through cloud storage facilities. Outsourced professionals can reduce in-house overheads, increasing the efficiency of a company and improving uptime management by relying on speciality knowledge that might not be otherwise available.

Offloading general IT tasks to experts can reduce costs, improve service quality and free up internal teams to focus on revenue-generating work that’s specific to a business. Service providers can also offer guidance or recommendations to help optimise the performance of an organisation’s infrastructure, leading to increased productivity.

Managed IT service providers are not tied to the same schedule as employees of a business and are often able to perform system updates and maintenance during off-hours, resulting in greater uptime and fewer workflow disruptions.

Before approaching a managed IT services provider, a company needs to take a thorough assessment of its IT needs and costs, in order to understand what infrastructure and workflows need to be managed, what resources they have and what the budget is for management. Once an organisation has narrowed down a list of providers, it’s important to perform an audit of its systems, which can assist in determining if the outsourced company has the support and experience needed to manage its assets. It is also crucial to ascertain whether managed IT service providers are competent with the specialised hardware or software a company is using or intends to use in the future, while ensuring whether they are familiar with any industry or compliance standards that apply to its systems and data.

In addition, when assessing potential vendors, it is crucial to pay attention to the capacity of the services that can be supplied. Providers should be able to scale with a business and ideally should have more bandwidth, service hours and expertise than a company requires, particularly if an organisation is planning big infrastructure changes in the near future.

An important question to ask is: Once you’ve selected a managed IT service provider, what do you actually get for your money?

Service providers like A-Solutions offer many business benefits to an organisation:

– Modular pricing (pay for functionality used and scale as business requirements change)
– Improve uptime with proactive alerts, remote interventions and self-healing capabilities (automation)
– Consolidate and standardise existing toolsets into one
– Protect internal IT and customers with advanced security solutions
– Monitor and manage Windows, Mac, Linux, virtual machines and network devices
– Operational cost savings (licensing, infrastructure, bandwidth and resourcing)
– Asset lifecycle management
– Hosted solutions
– Full audit (hardware and software) of IT infrastructure

With A-solutions, managed IT services include multiple core agent functionalities and add-on functionalities.

Core agent functionalities

– Patch management
– Remote monitoring
– Automation
– Discovery and asset management
– Network topology mapping
– Flexible reports and dashboard
– Two factor authentication

Add-on functionalities

– Anti-virus licence and management
– Backup and recovery
– Risk intelligence
– Server and mail management
– Mobile device management

Businesses can also benefit from the ITIL services configuration management database model offered by A-Solutions.

This model includes:

– User management (company/people)
– Service level agreement management (service request/SLA)
– Incident management (incident/problem)
– Planning and change management (planning/changes)
– Configuration management (discovery probe/software scanning)
– Asset management (financial management/supplier management/product catalogue)

In short, IT managed services involve proactive monitoring and maintenance, along with priority support and user and device management, for a fixed monthly fee.

These services can keep IT systems operating at peak performance. Not only do issues get resolved quickly, but businesses have access to the latest technology and innovative solutions that can maximise productivity and increase profits.

It is designed to take the worry and hassle out of IT, and being part of a service level agreement means a company knows how much it will cost and what outcomes it should expect.

Keeping organisations in touch with advances in technology, service providers like A-Solutions are able to help any business, its employees, its partners and its customers stay connected in today’s modern workplace, whether staff are working in-office, on-site or remotely.

Offering guidance and solutions, managed IT services provided by A-Solutions can assist businesses by handling the day-to-day operations of its technology, ensuring systems remain stable and optimal, while providing regular updates and insights into security risks.

A centralised service desk, based in Centurion, serves as the single point of contact for the logging of incidents, status updates or general enquiries for A-Solutions clients.

In addition, the support service offering includes upgrades, site planning, new product rollouts, moves, de-installs as well as the maintenance of products in and out of warranty, on an on-site or carry-in basis.

With A-Solutions, services focus as much on customer needs as they do on hardware and software, building and supporting an innovative, sustainable system to keep any business going in a diverse range of industries.

Find out more by visiting us at https://asolution.co.za/ or contact us on 012 661 7903.

Source: bizcommunity.com