When your business needs help in the IT department, then you’re looking for someone who will be skilled enough to deal with the issue. Hiring one person is often not enough, and you might not have the budget to create an entire department filled with professionals handling this problem.
This is why many companies will head this issue outside the office and outsource it to someone else. A company that is highly skilled and dedicated to IT services is the answer. Hiring these guys means you don’t have to deal with it, you don’t have to spend money on hiring new employees, and you have someone to take care of everything.
With the outsourced managed IT services, you will get the best possible deal for your business without employing additional people and spending a ton of money on it. Of course, hiring an outside company will also make you spend some money, but that is a lot less than the original idea.
So how much you’re spending on this? This question and many more are answered in this article. If you want to know more about these things, then read on and find out everything about the managed IT services, their cost, and how to find the best one for your business.
What is managed IT service?
Managed IT services are the services you receive from skilled and experienced IT experts that are helping your company handle the information technologies challenges. This is a broad field of expertise. Experts working with this are skilled in everything from providing IT advice to handling hardware issues in the office. See more on this link.
Of course, not everyone working within a company dealing with it is going to be equally skilled in everything. Some people are experts in networks, others in cloud backups, and some are notable for their fight against hackers.
All of these people are valuable for the organization, thus, they are valuable for you. Making a contract with a company like this means you’ll get excellent service and cover all fields that might be causing you problems. Now, let’s focus on how they are defining their price and how much they’ll charge you on average.
What factors play a role in defining a price?
Several factors are essential for creating the final price that a company like this will charge you for its services. The average price that most companies pay, however, is around $150 to $250 per hour. This is far from a fixed number, and many things affect the final price, but we take this as some average price.
If it seems too high, you should know that you aren’t hiring these guys to be at your place hours per day and every day. You’re hiring them to do a monthly check, give them a call when something’s off, or you need to solve a problem of some kind.
Now let’s see what the things that will dictate your price are, and what things are crucial for managed IT services companies to create a price for you. The main things are the time needed for a job, the amount of workload, the number of servers and data processed, and you might get charged for things that were not previously calculated. See in more detail below!
1. Time spent providing service
The more time they spend on the job, the more money they’ll need to pay. The good thing about hiring them for a long time is that they’ll most probably lower the final amount. For example, if you hire them to work 20 hours per week, they’ll surely not charge their hourly amount.
If you hire them to cover your network and provide anti-hacking service 24/7, they’ll surely not ask for $250 per hour. That unreasonable. Instead, you’ll pay a monthly amount that will be arranged together with you. You’ll come up with the best price for the job.
2. The amount of the workload
It’s not the same to ask them to monitor your network and to reconnect all computers in your office. The workload is going to determine the price in a significant manner, so you must understand that asking for more complex tasks will mean paying a higher price.
It’s the same with your job. You may spend some days in the office without pressure and stress, and the benefits of the two different days will pay off differently. When managed IT service guys come over and have to do something that’s not easy at all, they expect to be compensated properly.
3. The number of servers processed
Servers are highly complicated to deal with and they take a lot of time. Of course, this is what IT service guys do, so it’s easy for them, but the amount of servers means more time. It’s not the same to deal with one, and more of them.
In most cases, the price will be calculated based on the number of servers processed. This is a perfect indicator of how much work the team will need to handle. When you ask for a quote, the IT company will get back to you showing the price per hour, and per server.
4. The amount of data processing
The number of servers is a great indicator of how much work they’ll have, but also one service may differ from another tremendously. Not all of them are the same and require the same amount of time or energy. Some servers are packed with information, and others are nearly empty.
For example, if a backup is needed, one server may have just a few files to be transferred to the cloud, while others may have terabytes of data. Both won’t take the same amount of time and effort, so they’ll calculate a price based on the amount of data too. See what falls under data here: https://searchdatamanagement.techtarget.com/definition/data.
5. Ongoing expenses
Aside from everything you’ll do, there will always be something added that no one could’ve calculated. Expenses that were created while working, and without anyone knowing they were there will also affect the price.
Of course, it doesn’t mean that there will be some additional charge every time the team works on something, but there is a possibility for it, so make sure you understand there’s a chance for it.
Conclusion
These are some of the most valuable information you must know about managed IT services and how they are charged to you. If you’re about to hire one of these companies, you need to be sure that you know what you’re being charged, and how much you’re paying for it.