10 Signs Your Business Needs Managed IT Services

1. The same problems keep coming back. Slow computers, dropped Wi-Fi and email issues get patched for the day but never fixed at the cause, so employees lose time to them every week.
2. IT falls to someone with another job. An office manager, the owner or the most technical employee handles IT on top of their real work, and both jobs suffer.
3. Employees wait too long for help. There is no clear way to ask for support, or help arrives hours or days later, so people work around problems instead of reporting them.
4. IT costs are hard to predict. Repair bills, emergency visits and rushed purchases arrive without warning, which makes technology hard to budget. See our guide to IT budget planning.
5. New hires wait for computers and accounts. Setting up a new employee takes days, and no one is sure that former employees have lost access. See our onboarding and offboarding checklist.

6. No one can confirm that updates and backups work. Security updates, endpoint protection and backups are assumed to be running, but no one checks them or tests a restore.
7. Security questions you cannot answer. A cyber insurance application, a client security review or a compliance requirement asks about multi-factor authentication, backups and patching, and the answers are unclear. See our cyber insurance requirements checklist.
8. Downtime has already cost you. An outage, a failed server or a security scare stopped work, and recovery took longer than it should have. See the cost of IT downtime.
9. Equipment is aging without a plan. Computers, servers or firewalls are near the end of vendor support, and replacements happen only after something fails. See when to replace business IT equipment.
10. The business is growing or changing. New hires, a new office, remote employees or new software are on the way, and the current approach to IT will not keep up.

With managed IT services, a provider takes ongoing responsibility for your technology. Devices are monitored around the clock, security updates are applied on a schedule, endpoint protection is managed and employees have a help desk to call. Problems are tracked to their cause instead of fixed for the day.

Costs are easier to plan because a monthly agreement covers the ongoing work, and regular planning covers aging equipment, renewals and upcoming projects. For a side-by-side comparison, see break-fix vs. managed IT services.

If you have no internal IT staff, fully managed IT gives you a complete IT team. If you already have an IT person or a small team, co-managed IT adds help desk coverage, monitoring, security tools and extra hands while your staff keep the work they want to own.

Still weighing a provider against hiring? Read managed IT services vs. in-house IT.

Write down the signs that apply to your business and the problems they cause. Then ask two or three providers how they would handle each one. Our questions to ask a managed IT provider cover support, security, backups, pricing and contracts.

If you already work with a provider and still recognize several of these signs, it may be time to switch managed IT providers.

TechStarters has provided managed IT services to businesses since 2010. Every managed workstation and server includes endpoint protection, security patching and 24/7 monitoring. Our help desk is available 24/7. Unlimited remote support is included in managed IT plans Monday to Friday, 8 a.m. to 6 p.m., excluding major holidays; help desk calls outside those hours are billed separately.

Every engagement starts with a free IT assessment and a written proposal. Pricing is per device, with an annual or month-to-month agreement; see how managed IT pricing works. We support businesses nationwide from offices in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware and New York.