Reactive IT support was only appropriate when you had ten people and one server room. Someone’s laptop dies, you call the local guy, he fixes it, and you get back to work. The problem is, it’s not a sustainable model for growing your headcount, it’s just more expensive the more people you add, and most businesses only realize how much they’re paying when the costs are already mounting.
Below are five signs your IT was built for a smaller, simpler business.
Sign #1: Ticket volume keeps climbing
Everytime you add a new employee, there’s a number of things you have to get them up and running on. Issuing their laptop, their login credentials, their phone, potentially even a tablet, all of these things open the door for something to go wrong. With a reactive supplier, you can expect to pay more as you add more people, simply because they get paid every time they “put out a fire”.
Quick self audit: Look at your ticketing system. If you see the same issues coming up over and over in the last three months, you’re not actually solving problems, you’re paying for more tickets.
Sign #2: You’re always the last to know
With a break/fix supplier, there’s no one watching over your systems in between incidents. No one is watching for low disk space, or a server that’s overheating, or five failed logins at 2am. You only know something’s wrong when someone calls you and says they can’t log in, or the customer calls and says your invoice system is down.
The time between the incident occuring and you actually knowing about it is where the real cost lies. The Ponemon Institute’s 2016 Cost of Data Center Outages study put the average cost of a single unplanned data center outage at $740,357, which is 38% higher than the comparable figure in 2010 ($505,502). Most companies that aren’t at the enterprise level don’t have a data center, but the math still applies. The more your business relies on your systems being up and running, the more it costs when they aren’t.
Sign #3: Your team has started working around IT
When the ticketing system isn’t getting things resolved, people get creative. They sign up for a file sharing application on their own dime, build a project management tool nobody asked for, or start sending customer information to their personal email because it’s faster than waiting for a request to go through. That’s shadow IT, and while it’s not ideal, it’s often a symptom of a bigger problem.
Do a quick self audit: Ask three managers in different departments to tell you what software their teams use on a daily basis. If your IT department can’t tell you the same things, you’ve already had shadow IT in your company, you just didn’t know where to look.
The bigger problem is the data that gets put into these rogue applications. It’s unsecure, it’s unprotected, and it’s unrecoverable in the case of a disaster.
Sign #4: Security and compliance are outpacing your setup
Reactive support only addresses the symptoms. It doesn’t create logs, or patching schedules, or documented recovery procedures, and more and more, clients, auditors, and insurers are demanding those things. A cyber-insurance renewal asking for proof of endpoint monitoring and access controls, or a client audit looking for documented procedures around your data handling policies, can come as a shock if your only security posture involves calling someone when something goes wrong.
This is usually the point where businesses start looking into a different support model. Transitioning from a break/fix supplier to a managed service provider with documented controls and response procedures isn’t just an IT issue, it’s a business decision. It’s the point where managed services really start to shine, and it’s why companies like Auxilion can manage it as an ongoing service, rather than a one off request.
Sign #5: IT costs have stopped making sense
Break/fix pricing is simple, you pay for the individual incidents that require your support vendor to come in and fix something. That could be a failed server, or a cyber attack, or something in between, but it’s all billed out as an individual incident. There’s no fixed monthly cost covering the time or resources it takes to actually fix the problem, just a cost that’s applied to each individual incident based on what went wrong. More users, more devices, more incidents, more costs, with no economies of scale to be had, and no ability to plan your budget around an annual spend. Finance teams across the country groan when their IT vendor comes in with an invoice, because it’s no longer an operating expense, it’s a surprise spend.
With a managed model, you flip it on its head. Instead of paying for individual incidents, you pay a monthly bill that covers everything, from monitoring to maintenance to actual incident response, within certain parameters. It’s much more predictable, and much less of a shock to the system when the bill arrives.
The real difference is in the structure, not the technology
This doesn’t mean that your original setup was wrong, it just means that growing your business changed the game. Reactive support was perfect when you had ten people and one server, but as you grew, added customers, and started handling more and more of your business digitally, you stopped being able to plan around those costs. There’s no flashing light that tells you you’ve outgrown your IT infrastructure, but if you see more than a few of these signs, it’s definitely time to reconsider your options. The alternative to a reactive, whack-a-mole approach is an entirely different way of managing your business technology, and it’s not something you can solve with a single phone call.
