Information technology is important to a business. In fact, it’s easy to argue that the importance of IT is growing. Leaders are recognising this, Spiceworks’ 2020 State of IT report found that 44% of businesses are planning to grow IT expenditure in 2020, compared to 38% in 2019.

Merely throwing cash at IT is not enough, however. When evaluating options for IT support, London companies much seek out the right IT partner – a partner that can support your business in times of difficulty, and a partner that helps your business make the most of its technology investments.

In this article, we present five core areas you should look at when evaluating your existing IT support partner, or as you choose your next technology support partner.

Start-ups and small businesses are often highly cost-conscious, with a can-do attitude that usually sees the founders becoming involved in a range of non-core activities – including in supporting the IT that helps businesses tick over.

However, as a business grows, owner-managers must realise that it’s impossible to personally service every business requirement, and that experts in their respective fields, such as IT, can deliver so much more.

In this article, we outline how taking steps to outsource IT support can help you grow your business more quickly and more sustainably. Read on to find out why outsourced IT support is an essential step for growing businesses.

Choosing an IT support company is not a decision that should be taken lightly. Bear in mind that, due to the deep dependence of modern businesses on their IT infrastructures, the choice of IT support company can make a substantial impact on business processes. In this post, we outline 10 important questions you need to ask when choosing from a list of candidates.

There is one area on which everyone concentrates when it comes to getting the most out of an IT budget: squeezing the supplier. Though getting commodity items at the best prices and achieving the most value out of the services and IT support costs you pay for is important, there are many other areas where careful consideration can result in far more optimal IT spending.

Deloitte’s 2016-2017 CIO survey found that, on average across all industries, expenditure on IT packages, staff, and services accounts for 3.28% of a company’s turnover, with businesses in professional services industries commonly managing annual IT budgets of 6% of overall turnover. The importance of optimal spending is clearly very high. Here we outline a few of the top areas we think your business should focus on.

The reliability of the IT organisation plays a critical role in every enterprise, given how the use of technology has deeply entrenched itself into every business organisation. From being more of back office tools a few decades ago, IT systems are now front and center in many enterprises’ business activities.

With IT contributing significantly to customer-facing applications, analytics services, and even creating new revenue streams for the enterprise, it’s important for the IT group to maintains its operational and cost efficiency. One way to ensure that the IT network competently responds to business needs while keeping within budgets is to implement IT infrastructure standardisation.

Do we keep our IT services in-house, or do we outsource IT responsibilities? That is the question many management teams ask themselves when they look at the benefits of managed IT services. Outsourcing IT services save costs, introduces new knowledge and helps businesses focus. However fully outsourcing IT functions is not the best route for every organisation, and there are pros and cons to each approach. But how about opting for a mixed model?