IT Delivered Your Way. White Paper. Why Outsource IT?

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1 White Paper

2 NetWize is a full-service managed IT services provider based in Salt Lake City, Utah. We offer a unique approach to outsourced IT that lets you depend on us as your technology partner, fully committed to keeping your systems running like a well-oiled machine. This whitepaper explains the benefits of outsourcing for small and mid-sized businesses, and why NetWize is the smart choice. Have you outgrown your IT expertise? Most small businesses can do fine for a while with home-grown IT expertise. When you re in startup mode, every ounce of budget and time is earmarked for building your business and getting customers. Everyone is willing to work crazy hours because it is exciting to be in on the ground floor when a dream is born. The most technical guy in the office becomes the de facto IT department, in addition to all of his other responsibilities. At some point, if you ve done things right, your business begins to grow. You reach that tipping point where you can t support any more growth without better back-end systems. Maybe you get a new client who requires a rock-solid Disaster Recovery plan. Maybe you want to add a line of business that exposes you to Federal regulations. Maybe your tech guy burns out, or you need him in a different role. Maybe you just can t afford to have your server crash one more time. If you re there, congratulations. That means you are one of the elite -- a small business that not only survives but grows. What you do next can make all the difference in where you go from here. Step IT up When you are ready to invest in an IT solution that can support your growth, you will find a number of options on the market today. Many of them have significant gotchas which you should consider before you choose a direction. 1 Hourly Support You can find companies who will do whatever you need and charge you by the hour. On the face of it, this sounds pretty sweet to some small business owners, because it sounds like the cheapest route. You won t feel locked in to anything, and that gives you a great sense of independence and freedom. There are some gotchas to this arrangement: Luck of the draw. You never know who they ll send when you call for help. It will seldom be the same person who worked on your systems last time, so it ll take some time for them to learn how your systems are architected before they get around to fixing anything. In this arrangement, time actually IS money. So basically you ll be paying for someone to come up to speed every time you call them. Narrow vision. When you call someone to do a specific project, or fix something, you will get exactly what you ask for. And nothing more. They will come in, do what is needed to get you running, and leave. They won t be looking for things like obsolete or under-utilized servers. They won t notice that your licenses are about to expire for your lead-tracking tools. They won t look for any security patches that you need to apply. It s not that they re dumb it s just a function of this a la carte approach to IT. Natural forces against you. If you pay someone by the hour to fix things, there s no incentive for them to permanently improve your environment. Their focus is on fixing broken things, rather than making things unbreakable. Put simply, they make money when you have problems. The result is usually an environment that is severely neglected, sporadically patched, or that has never been hardened from the top down.

3 Block Contract You can find companies who will provide a block of hours for a monthly fee. This often sounds good too. You can schedule them in advance for recurring visits, so you get the impression that your costs are contained and predictable. You figure you can tell your employees when to expect their IT guy to be there, so they won t pester you when they need an upgrade, the network slows down, or they need application training. However, there are some gotchas here too. Costs aren t really fixed. Some things can wait till next month s hours, and some can t. If you exceed the hours in the contract, you have to pay more. You let things slide. If you don t want to pay overage fees, you will be tempted to let some things slide until the next month. Bad things can happen when you leave little IT problems in place. And who decides which things will get done and which things can wait? You won t know which ones are the most critical, and they may urge you to do them all right now. Same natural forces against you. As with the hourly approach, there is no incentive for them to optimize your environment, because all of your problems mean billable hours for them. Live with it till the tech guy comes. Your employees will probably have to wait until the next scheduled visit to get their issues resolved. The results can be anything from annoying to downright catastrophic. What does it cost you if your IT systems aren t there to support sales, marketing, accounts payable, your company website, and employee collaboration? What is the real cost of an hour of downtime in your business? 2 Internal Staff Relying on your most techie employees to run IT for you is a common early-stage approach to IT. But many businesses are stuck for years in that no-man s land between being a 2-person startup, and being big enough to hire a dedicated IT staff (right around 700 employees you will probably hit that point). Here are the common gotchas if you ask your employees to do IT tasks in addition to their other roles. Not proactive or consistent. Unless their day job is mowing the lawns, your employees will usually have trouble prioritizing mundane IT tasks ahead of their other roles. And at different times of the year, if your business is at all seasonal, your entire team might be fully engaged in business development, sales, or customer service. Things like patching the servers, answering help-desk calls, and upgrading applications will often take a back seat. Not 100% reliable. If you have one guy doing part-time IT, what happens when they get sick, or go on vacation? Good enough isn t really good enough. Your guys do their best, but they probably aren t certified IT professionals with years of experience and regular training on new technologies. You can t hold them responsible for missing things, or failing to fix things correctly, or making errors that result in downtime or data loss. Missing the big picture. They may be able to keep things rolling along, but they are likely not qualified to analyze the architecture and discover under-utilized servers, design and build the perfect mix of virtual, cloud and physical servers, install complex software systems, protect your missioncritical services, and proactively find and fix security gaps. Whoever said the devil was in the details must have been talking about IT. Your double-duty employees simply don t have the bandwidth or expertise to address all of the devilish details.

4 The NetWize Solution There is a better way. It s called Outsourced IT, or Managed Services. We ve been doing it for fourteen years for businesses of every size, right here in the Intermountain West. With NetWize Managed Services you get enterprise-quality IT support that a small or mid-sized business can afford. You pay a fixed fee for IT support, and we cover anything and everything you need. No hidden costs, no overage fees. This solves the gotchas inherent in the other models. Major benefits 1. Predictable monthly costs. With the fixed fee structure, all day-to-day support is covered no matter how long it takes. And if you need a big project that isn t covered by your service contract, we will provide a clear statement of costs so you are never blind-sided by a big bill you didn t anticipate. 2. Natural forces in your favor. If you have problems, we lose money. That one element exerts tremendous pressure on us to keep your entire system in tip-top shape. We become your technology partners -- what s good for you is good for us. We are invested in keeping you up and running because it costs us money when you go down. As a result, we dedicate a lot of time to proactive tuning, system analysis, and support to avoid any disruptions, rather than making our money when things are broken. 3. Top-drawer engineers. Since our business is keeping your IT running like a well-oiled machine, we hire the best. Our engineers are experienced, brilliant, and highly trained, and we invest a great deal in their on-going training so they can expertly apply new and innovative technologies to your systems. 4. Team of experts at your disposal. With NetWize, you get a whole team of experts whose combined experience and insight can be brought to bear on any problem that might crop up in your systems. 5. Your employees can do their jobs. Your entire workforce can devote their full time to doing the work that builds your business, and won t have to split their attention with IT tasks. 6. Unwavering focus. We have no other focus besides IT. There are three essential areas that IT must pay attention to with great discipline. These are the same areas that an enterprise IT department worries about -- we focus on them for each of our clients: IT Infrastructure, Support, and Strategy. With NetWize as your Managed Services department, you will have enterprise-quality IT service from enterprise-quality engineers, for a fixed and affordable monthly fee. 3 How we do it The monthly fixed fee entitles you to four distinct, yet integrated, offerings. We have learned over years of experience that together these comprise the perfect combination of IT services and support that keep our customers happy and successful. 1. Proactive technology management. We make sure your essential network needs are being watched over with a range of offerings like patch management, anti-virus and spyware protection, spam control, remote backup, and desktop optimization. This allows us to make sure that all covered machines are updated, protected, monitored, and documented. 2. Reactive Support Services. While our proactive approach has proven to significantly reduce the support needed by your end users, computers still break and users still need help. Our service desk

5 team quickly responds to any requests from your users. If an issue cannot be fixed remotely, onsite support will be provided as well. We ll even answer the how-to questions that new employees have about their desktop applications. 3. Network Administration. After years of working with small to medium-sized businesses, we realized that business owners are not always informed of the risks that are being taken in IT. We think that is a problem that leads to poor decision-making. Therefore, we assign a Network Administrator to your business, to routinely review your environment to identify where you may not be following industry best practices. They provide you with all the necessary information to make business decisions. What s more, your Network Administrator is tasked with documenting your environment thoroughly. This becomes an invaluable resource for the entire team of NetWize engineers. It allows them to support your users as quickly as possible, even if your Network Administrator is away at training, on vacation, or on sick leave. 4. Virtual Chief Information Officer (VCIO). As your technology partner, we will quickly become the experts in how your company uses technology. This information is extremely valuable in helping you use technology to help your company grow and to improve internal processes. The dedicated VCIO meets with you and your management team on a quarterly basis to review the past quarter and to assist with plans for future growth. Services include a regular technology summary, design desk resources, budget planning and disaster recovery planning. Customers Speak We ve outsourced our IT work for eight years. NetWize has saved us a lot of time and money. Our employees know to contact NetWize directly when a problem arise. Jim Bryan, CAO, Maxam North America For 13 years, CPS has let Netwize be our IT experts so we don t have to worry about it. They have provided excellent support and our end users enjoy their friendly service. Sharla Landers, Controller, Compressor Pump and Service Next Steps Ready to take the next step? We would love to sit down and discuss your needs with you. Give us a call today, or visit our website at for more information. NetWize West Confluence Ave. Salt Lake City, UT sales@netwize.net