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What’s The Cost of IT Support In Kentucky?
Are you scaling up your business and need IT support to maintain that growth? Do you run an established business with a limited IT team that’s drowning in work? In either case, you might benefit from hiring Managed IT Services for your company.
Managed IT Services allow you to “rent out” your IT requirements rather than hire more IT staff or even a whole IT department. Even better, they do everything a regular IT department does for a business, including:
- Help desk
- Designing, installing, and maintaining network systems
- Designing, installing, and maintaining server systems
- Application development
- Providing proactive IT solutions to meet the needs of your company
- And more
Now that you’re more familiar with how Managed IT Services work and how these services can better support your business needs, let’s review their costs.
Most IT providers charge a fixed monthly rate for unlimited managed services. In some rare instances, providers charge by the hour.
However, this rate can greatly range depending on a variety of cost factors, such as:
- Number of users
- Type of business
- Condition of hardware and type of environment
- Fully managed or partially managed services
In this article, we’ll break down the cost factors so you have a better understanding of what side of the cost range you can expect a proposal to be on.
Want to work with an experienced IT company that can fulfill various business needs in different industries?
From outsourcing help desk support to complement an existing IT department, 46Solutions has helped set many Kentucky businesses up with Managed IT Services. Call us at (859) 788-4600, email us at info@46Solutions.com, or fill out our easy 5-question online form for a free consultation.
Schedule today!Number of Users
The biggest impact on the overall costs for Managed IT Services is the number of users. Typically, providers charge a fixed monthly rate per user, similar to how other industries charge per head.
What is a user?
A user is technically anyone working at your company that’s not directly supporting, developing, or maintaining the systems that your company operates.
However, even people in your company’s IT department are considered users for managed IT services. Because providers typically manage all the machines for users, adding requested services (like filters, antivirus programs, patches, etc.) also applies to your internal IT department’s machines and anybody else’s machines in your organization.
Here’s an example of how a Managed IT company would quote a monthly price to a customer. If you have ten users at your company and an IT provider charges $135 per user, you’ll end up paying $1,350 a month in Managed IT Services, or about $20k a year.
While the rate for managed IT services may seem pricey, you want to think in terms of what you’ll save by not needing to hire an IT director. The average salary for an IT director ranges from $80,000 to $100,000 a year. Not to mention, people get sick, go on vacation, and help other departments, so you won’t always have somebody on call.
When you hire a managed IT services team instead of a director, or you use a team to supplement your internal staff, you will be able to:
- Have constant coverage
- Have the collective knowledge of a whole team at your disposal
- Protect your internal staff from potential burnout
- Save your company approximately $60,000-$80,000 a year
Is there a way to pay less per user?
Another factor to consider is that some providers will offer volume discounts. With such a discount, the more users you have, the more your cost-per-user decreases. Contact us to learn about 46Solutions’ volume discount.
All in all, your per-user cost is a fixed rate per month, making the cost of IT Support transparent and convenient to budget for once you receive a quote.
Type of Business
The cost of Managed IT Services goes up depending on your industry, which is especially true of industries with high regulatory or compliance burdens.
At the same time, the need for such IT services within these industries is growing every day. In 2021 alone, more than 19.8 billion records have been exposed, with the healthcare and financial industries being the two areas with the highest risk of a breach.
If your company is responsible for protecting sensitive customer data, it lives or dies based on the quality of your IT infrastructure. While your service costs may increase to safeguard data, it’s a small price to pay knowing that your company is safe from cybercrime, financial loss, legal repercussions, reputational damage, and operational downtime.
Scalable, secure, and innovative Managed IT Services are crucial to ensure your business keeps up in pace with:
- Evolving customer expectations for their experience and data protection
- Compliance standards
- Competitor upgrades to their IT infrastructure
- The constant advances of malware and hackers
- Delivering business continuity
Managed IT Services can help you focus on training your employees on HIPAA compliance or financial regulations instead of worrying about how to safeguard customer data.
Condition of Hardware and Type of Environment
Condition of Hardware
The age of your company’s hardware (e.g., computers, servers, etc.) can affect the cost of your Managed IT Services.
If your company’s hardware reaches its end-of-life (also called end-of-support) date, manufacturers will no longer support it. When this happens, your hardware will require more IT maintenance to safeguard it from potential threats.
Thousands of businesses around the world are running on end-of-life hardware. According to one study from October 2021 that involved over 60,000 companies and 30 million devices, over 50% of enterprise machines didn’t meet requirements to run Windows 11.
Microsoft has threatened to pull security updates for businesses that manually install Windows 11 on hardware that doesn’t meet CPU and TPM requirements. Managed IT Services can help eliminate the issue of keeping track of and dealing with end-of-life hardware, which is great news for companies that cannot afford all new equipment.
What if you’re a new company and don’t have much hardware? Well, if you’ve enlisted the services of a managed IT provider, they can help you set up computers, servers, switches, routers, and storage equipment. Because you aren’t buying the hardware outright, your small business can save money and stay safe against cyber threats. You’ll also be able to contact your provider when your business needs to scale.
Type of Software Environment
Similarly, the type of software environment your company uses can affect the cost of Managed IT Services. Environment refers to your business’s operating system, i.e., Windows, iOS, Linux, etc.
Depending on your IT provider’s familiarity with your preference, they may charge more depending on which operating system your company uses.
Fully Managed or Partially Managed Services
When hiring a Managed IT Services provider, you’ll have to decide whether you need fully managed or partially Managed IT Services.
Small- to medium-sized businesses tend to have fully Managed IT Services for the simple reason that they probably don’t have an IT department at all (or an understaffed one). Fully-managed services give these businesses access to on-call support and hardware/software updates without the expensive upfront cost of equipment and licenses.
Larger businesses tend to gravitate towards partially managed services because they likely supplement an existing internal IT team. An external IT team can take on the more mundane help desk support tasks to give your internal team the time back for strategy work.
Are Managed IT Services Worth It for Small- and Medium-Sized Businesses?
You bet they are. The most significant benefit of small- and medium-sized businesses using Managed IT Services is protection against downtime because of cyberattacks without paying for a costly internal team.
Let’s take a look at the numbers behind cyberattacks on small businesses:
- According to a recent U.S. Small Business Administration survey, 88% of small business owners felt their businesses were vulnerable to cyberattacks and didn’t have contingency plans.
- In 2021, a study found that over 58% of America’s small businesses have suffered a security or data breach.
- Over 44% of those affected businesses had to spend $250-500k to resolve the breach, while 16% had to fork over $500k-1m.
- After the breach, 42% of affected businesses had to take 1-2 years to recover. 28% had to take 3-5 years to recover, and some businesses had to shut down operations entirely.
Think your small business has no vulnerabilities? Sign up for a 46Solutions’ 30-minute security risk assessment for FREE. We’ll donate $100 to a charity of your choice and provide a FREE cybersecurity awareness training lunch-n-learn program for eight of your employees if we can’t find any vulnerabilities in 30 minutes.
Want Stress-Free Managed IT Services? Contact 46Solutions.
With 300+ years of combined IT experience, the 46Solutions team has provided or supplemented IT systems and support for Kentucky-based businesses for years. We even made it on Business Lexington’s Local IT Firm list for 2021. We specialize in helping small- and medium-sized businesses in various industries that typically do not have IT staff or have limited IT staffing.
Our Managed IT Services include, but are not limited to, system design, equipment specification, installation, maintenance, day-to-day systems, and user support like a help desk. We’ll also assist specific customer types with developing specialized Safety applications or day-to-day applications to eliminate paper and provide enhanced reporting.
Contact us for a free consultation. We’ll provide you with a customized proposal.
Schedule today!
