IT Outsourcing for Companies

IT Outsourcing is often though as a new age method of reducing costs and increasing coverage, but we've been doing it since the mid 90's at our UK based offices in Uxbridge, Nottingham, Manchester and Sleaford. Whether to outsource or not, and how much to outsource really depends on your business and core objectives, and outsourcing isn't a one size fits all solution as many companies start the journey with Managed Services, then slowly migrate over to outsourcing. Whether Managed Services or Complete Outsourcing the process of onboarding is a carefully crafted and well travelled process designed to make the process painless and effective. The five main classes of IT Outsouricng are: 

Hardware Support

Outsourcing your hardware support is a cost effective way to manage failures. Usually charged on a per machine or per incident basis, having all your hardware repaired or replaced at a fixed monthly cost can be a budgetary benefit. When outsourcing Hardware Support we would often supply a number of 'cold spares' to your site ensuring that key equipment is already on site and avoiding any delay in recovery. Everything else is collected or RTB, worked on and retured within a given and specific timeframe. We only supply the highest class hardware solutions and every HP and Synology server we supply is automatically included in any support agreement for 5 years from installation at no extra charge.  

Desktop Support

Outsourcing Desktop support allows you to cover desktop incidents for a fixed monthly or per incident fee. This allows simple budgetary control over IT costs whilst ensuring that users are not inhibited by desktop issues. Where an application is involved and its either bespoke or specialist then there will be some training required and that would normally be wrapped into the contract. 

Infrastructure Support

The most risk to any business continuity would be infrastructure, and that incldues routers, switches, cabling, servers and Wireless but excludes desktop's, workstaions, printers, and other non-essential peripherals. Many organisations choose to outsource their infrastructure but keep desktop support in house. Infrastrucutre Outsourcing will almost always include a strict service level agreement establishing timescales for response and remedy. For larger sites cold swap hardware or even hot swap will be provided and installed as part of the agreeemnt to ensure compliance with the agreed service level. On larger sites its often applicable to install part/full time staff on site to aid in monitoring and recovery from any issues. 

Managed Services Support

Becoming more popular is Outsourcing of Services, which could be Software, Solutions, Docker Nodes, Virtual Servers or even physical servers hosted centrally. Managed services outsourcing provides a service level guaranteed uptime for key business functions usually at a fixed monthly cost. Managed Services is often mis-applied to cloud services such as office365 but these are not strictly managed services. A good example of a Managed Service would be a physical server on site which is then virtualised and hosted with us so we can maintain and support it easily. We would take case of the day to day as well as backup's, restores, virus protection and so on. 

Connectivity Outsourcing

For customers with larger wide area networks, expanding Infrastructure support to encompass the entire wide area networks is a favourable route and cost effective whilst ensuring stability and performance. We would supply, maintain and support all circuits and optionally install backup circuits to ensure compliance with any service level agreement. 

Key benefits of IT Outsourcing

The 4 main reasons why outsourcing should be a consideration of every business from small to large and here they are: 

  1. Expertise. Whilst your in house staff may be able to take on day to day, there's always going to be something they can't solve and you can't always afford to have a team of technical experts in house just in case it does. With outsourcing your IT even if you keep some in house staff (or we supply them) there is nothing we cannot solve quickly and efficiently. Upgrades, Rollbacks, Disaster Recovery, we can do it all because that's what we do and you never find yourself in the situation where your IT guy is on holiday and its all gone down the tubes. If we say 24/7 we mean it, every single day of the year our technical teams are supporting our customers day and night. 
  2. Quality. Often in IT, there's the right way and a catalog of wrong ways to solve every problem. The option taken depends on the knowledge and competence of your IT staff. At GEN, we never compromise, not on hardware, not on software and certainly not on quality staff.
  3. Revenue. In most companies today, IT takes a major role in the corporate revenue stream, whether that be via a CRM or through websites, and the better these systems work, the more efficient they become the more effective they are at fulfilling their purpose - revenue. 
  4. Savings. Probably the easiest of all is significant cost savings and the reason is probably best illustrated with some examples: 

Firstly let's assume you have two IT staff on 30K each, so 60K annually not including employers contributions and the such like, and what do they actually do? Well that's a hard one because every company is different, but in all probability they will be doing a mixture of (a) Fixing Faults with printers, screens, PC's, etc, (b) Fixing system issues and (c) Upgrading and patching software. When you consider this, people often overlook the obvious, which is WHY does everything always need fixing?? In a properly supported environment the number of system issues should be minimal, and the number of hardware issues should be non existent. So once everything is fixed properly, what are your two IT guys going to do? Not much in reality, which is why in the majority of cases, when we take over your IT we actually take on your IT staff and manage them for you to ensure the minimal disruption. 

So, how does it sound now? Take your existing IT department and supplement or replace it with 24/7 UK based support from a team of experts in just about everything. No excuses, no fails, just doing it right every time. If you're looking for holiday, absence or supplemental cover then we've got a range of services including a flat rate pay per use option that costs you nothing unless you need us. If your a service provider and are looking for someone to pick up the slack when it gets busy then we've got a programme for that too. 

If you want to discuss the options then give us a call today, or chat online, or even email us via the contact form and we'll come right back to you! 

Contact us

Our 2022/2023 Referral Program

The majority of our new business comes from customer referrals, and that's awesome, but we wanted to reward those customers who refer us somehow. Traditionally, we did this by crediting their account with £25

...

Search Engine Optimisation is no longer something that can be automated nor scripted and because of the way results are now tailored to your browsing history then 'ranking' no longer has any relevance. That doesn't mean that you can no long

...

Californias legislators took their oaths of office for a fresh two-year session last week. As we prepared for a new session, its worth looking back at the past sessionin which, with

Apple are probably one of the best known technology manufacturers having been in the business for more than twenty years. GEN are both Apple Partners and Apple Developers investing heavily in Apple based products and services in house and w

...