In a tech company, there are two major categories of IT tasks. Those that develop and improve your product, and those that support normal company processes like the Network Operations Center (NOC) and help desk services.
For both you need skilled, dedicated technicians and engineers but their goals are very different. How your company builds these teams and assigns tasks will have a huge impact on your efficiency, quality, and cost of overhead depending on the choices you make. Naturally, you want your valuable developers, testers, and infrastructure engineers to focus on continuing to make you the high-quality product your customers love, but what about the maintenance IT tasks?
Vertical Integration
Every company interacts differently in its relationships between the departments. While it’s true that huge corporations tend to have their own internal IT support teams, this technique isn’t right for everyone. In many cases, their IT departments were formed well before the current tech environment of SaaS and cloud services, back when troubleshooting often required direct access to a machine. Things have changed since then, and you have a lot more options available to you ranging from a small in-house team to complete outsourcing and everything in between.
Quality and Overhead
If you really wanted to, you could build an entire IT support department into your company, but there’s no need to spend all that money on office space, salaries, benefits, and equipment, much less the time and cost of hiring skilled and experienced support technicians and security admins. In truth, many of the best IT support professionals have branched out into separate companies, covering their own office overhead with cost-effective B2B services. Using the wonders of SSH access and cloud connections, an IT support team no longer has to be in the same building as the devices they monitor and provide high-quality technical support.
Making Room for Development
Developing software and supporting it may be closely related, but they are not the same task. You want your programmers and engineers to have the right kind of time and space to focus on improving your products, not answering support calls. The best thing you can do for your valuable production team is to completely separate their jobs from IT help-desk-style support. With good software and documentation, professional support technicians can become almost as familiar with your product as the developers. This allows you to provide a more personalized support experience without cutting into valuable production time.
Multi-Location Business
One of the best things about remote NOC and IT support is the ability to branch out. When your IT team can reach you from anywhere, it doesn’t matter which one of your facilities needs support or where the technician is physically located. Remote troubleshooting, configuration, and even complete installation processes can be managed at a distance so you can keep opening up new locations on the same support plan simply by granting access to each new network to your remote IT team.
Streamlining Your Business
Businesses are always looking for ways to increase efficiency and decrease overhead costs. This process of streamlining is great for cutting unnecessary processes and ensuring every decision considers both customer satisfaction and overhead costs. Outsourcing your IT help desk and NOC saves you the effort and expense of an in-house IT department while granting you access to highly skilled and experienced IT professionals who provide the same reliable service to dozens of other tech companies. Whether you’re an established software developer looking to streamline or a small business building your first departments, the IT experts at Tie National can cover your help desk and NOC needs so your in-house engineers can focus on what they do best: making exemplary products. If you’d like more information on efficiency through outsourcing, contact us today.
Michael Durante spent his teenage years into his early 20s climbing the ladder in a branch of a successful banking firm, starting as a teller and ending as a Sr. Branch Manager within 6 years. In 2003, he left the banking world to join his father and create TIE National, a telecom company 60 years in the making. Together, they grew the company from a two-man operation solely working on telephones to a multi-million dollar international business with employees in over a dozen states, covering everything from phone systems to cloud products and computer systems. You can find Michael on LinkedIn.