How SMBs Can Close Technical Skill Gaps

Technical skill gaps are often inevitable in small to mid-sized businesses. Putting together a highly skilled team to manage all your IT support needs typically just isn’t in the budget. However, this doesn’t mean you can’t put together the skill sets you need. One option to consider is to work with a managed IT services provider. This can be a more budget-friendly solution to getting the work you need done.

Why Technical Skill Gaps Arise in the First Place

Small and mid-sized businesses often have just a few people at most to manage all their IT service needs. These personnel are tasked with handling everything from basic troubleshooting to securing remote devices which access their cloud service provider. In many cases, the workload borne by these employees is equivalent to what an understaffed restaurant experiences on a Saturday night. No matter how hard they try, they can’t keep up, and things get missed.

It’s hard to blame your IT staff—they’re just under resourced. For very small businesses, things are even worse because it’s often just the owner or one of the employees trying to manage IT on the side. This leaves them in even more of a lurch when things go wrong.

Working with a managed IT services provider can help you fill in all the gaps and ensure that no one is overworked. You also benefit from the more comprehensive support you get to help your business stay safe and run more smoothly.

So how do you start?

First, Identify Your Gaps

If you don’t have an experienced IT team or you’re trying to manage your business and IT on your own, you might not even realize you have technical skill gaps.

If you aren’t able to identify those gaps by yourself, a managed IT services can help. They can provide customized recommendations on how you can be more proactive in keeping your systems safer from cyberattacks, streamline operations, and adjust your IT strategy to be more cost-effective and efficient.

Filling The Gaps

Larger companies often have large IT teams that cover a wide range of skill sets. One might be experienced with cloud management, another with network security, one with data recovery, and so on.

On the other hand, smaller companies are constrained by their smaller budgets, so they need to take a different approach.  The same managed IT services provider that helps you identify your gaps can help you fill them. They can give you access to an entire team that can not only help you handle day to day support, but also provide the high-level technical expertise to help you implement complex IT projects. Having this level of support can help your business grow and thrive much like your larger counterparts.

Make Sure Your Skills Gap Package is Optimized for Your Particular Needs

There is no “one-size fits all” approach to IT support. Trying to close technical gaps by just hiring more people doesn’t always work. Instead, you need an experienced team of experts that starts by understanding your business, uncovering vulnerabilities and areas for improvement, and recommends a customized strategy for your needs.

When you optimize IT support for your particular business, you get the right tools, solutions, and support to help your business meet your particular goals. Plus, it’s much more affordable to work with a custom solution.

Look for Predictable Costs

It’s common to outsource various aspects of your business, such as accounting and legal. So, why not outsource IT as well? When you might not have the budget for a larger, full-time IT staff, managed IT support is much more affordable due to lower, predictable costs. Instead of the typical pay by the hour IT services, managed services give you a set monthly cost based on your number of employees and average needs.

This helps IT support fit better into even tight budgets. After all, the cost of your systems going down or a data breach is much higher and extremely difficult to recover from.

Want to Learn More?

GSDSolutions offers IT support in Mountain View and throughout the Bay Area and Central Valley. Our friendly team provides IT support to help with both small and large projects while also ensuring employees get the technical support, they need to stay productive. We provide a proactive approach to cybersecurity, keeping your business, employees, and customers safer. This also helps reduce costly downtime. No matter what your technical skill gaps might be, we can help close them.

Give our team at GSDSolutions IT Services a call at (650) 282-7695, or drop us an email at getstuffdone@gsdsolutions.io to learn more about our services and how we can help you put a