Adopting Proactive Managed Services, To maintain the health of your business network, it is wise to adopt the “prevention is better than cure” approach. Your business becomes at risk for infection if the health of your business network is not attentively maintained by your IT department.
The IT infrastructure of any business has become an integral part of the entire body in today’s business world. Therefore, it is imperative to support the business through wisely aligned technology, i.e., Reactive Managed Services or Proactive Managed Services.
Nowadays, most business networks and IT infrastructures use proactive managed services ensuring prevention from technical issues before they become a problem. A proactive managed approach guarantees quick monitoring and identification of problems before they intensify.
In today’s business-oriented world, the competition is quite understood, especially for small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs). Unlike larger enterprises, small businesses cannot afford the luxury of investing in tools and systems that can efficiently manage their business network.
To stay viable, play well along with the competitors, and have access to the same range of IT expertise as used by the larger companies, small businesses are shifting to proactive managed services.
What are Proactive Managed Services?
As discussed, proactive managed services are mostly preferred by small to medium-sized businesses. A proactive managed IT service maintains stable and secure systems through advanced monitoring tools. The support that proactive IT services provide usually solves the IT issues before they become big threats to the business network and IT infrastructure.
Moreover, the proactive managed service support is anticipatory rather than volatile. A minor step towards prevention works wonders for the stability of a small business. A strategic management tool for preventing network downtime is frequently scheduled maintenance services. Imagine the collective cost of a single hour of interruptions or downtime across your business, and the cost of proactive managed services looks like a deal. This alleviates the heavy cost of a downed network or any emergency IT project.
How are Proactive Managed Services Different from Reactive Approach?
Reactive IT support is also known as the break-fix solution. Your business only needs and receives support when something goes wrong. For example, you will bother to call your IT service provider to come onsite and fix the Wi-Fi when networks are down. Since no one touches the network until something is wrong, downtime is a common occurrence with reactive support.
The downside of reactive IT support is that there is a lack of understanding of the IT ecosystem of the business. The reactive managed service might take time to search and figure out the network outage source. It could be anything, an internal wiring issue, power outage, bad Wi-Fi connection, or a problem with the internet provider. There is no way to know about the problem until the network team tests every possible solution onsite, which is time-consuming as well as could be prone to human errors.
Therefore, the proactive managed IT service model is considered as the less painful alternative, as unlike the reactive approach with surprise bills at the end of it, it covers break-fix services at a predictable monthly rate with a proactive solution. Additionally, the proactive managed services usually come with cloud services, network security, backup solutions, and infrastructure as a service (IaaS).
The table below explains the difference between the two in simple words:
| Proactive Managed Services | Reactive Managed Services |
| It comes with predictable IT costs making it easier for businesses to manage. | It comes with high cost and low value. |
| It’s perfectly suitable for SMBs. | Not suitable for SMBs because of the high-cost factor. |
| Provides resolution before the actual crisis occurs. | It comes into action only when an issue is detected. |
| Removes complexity out of technology services by providing inclusive IT support. | It’s complex and comes with surprise bills as price fluctuates depending on the IT issue. |
Why Should Businesses Prefer Proactive Managed Services?
Small and medium-sized businesses have to cope up with various tasks as per the daily demands of the business, like delivering excellent customer service, acquiring new customers, retaining the old ones, meeting government regulations, hiring employees, avoiding inefficiency, managing costs, and keeping up with the industry trends.
Technology has always helped SMBs to maintain a competitive edge by streamlining their processes and improving employee productivity. But everything has a downside too, and that’s where proactive managed services come in.
Managed services convert into the stable costs of proactive support from the variable IT costs tied to the break-fix or reactive mode of support. Instead of getting caught up with unexpected bills when tech issues arise, this allows the businesses to effectively budget and pay what their pocket allows on a set schedule.
Rather than addressing the problems in sequential order, it can be done simultaneously with multiple levels of onsite and remote IT support available. The proactive managed service IT approach is also responsible for quick responses, i.e., detecting and resolving the issues while they are still hidden from the end-user. This active responsiveness leads to improved productivity; the staff becomes more tech-literate that leverages the technology investment of the business efficiently.
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