How Much Does IT Support Cost for Small and Medium-Sized Businesses?

Posted on September 23, 2021

Topics: IT Infrastructure

How Much Does IT Support Cost for Small and Medium-Sized Businesses?

Budgeting for a small business is never easy, particularly when it comes to allocating funds for your company’s IT support. In fact, most small and medium-sized businesses push their IT support needs to the back of their minds. 

As a small business your company’s focus is on providing clients with the best possible experience you can, increasing profit margins and developing top quality products and services that keep your customers coming back for more.

You wear many hats as a business owner. The reality is, you don’t have the time to sit at your desk worrying about how you are going to handle technological emergencies, such as a system outage.

In some instances, you may have a small IT team at your disposal, but it’s still unlikely that they have the finances, resources or even the expertise to handle some of the more complex challenges that occur within your systems. 

This all means that at any moment your business could suffer from serious downtime that significantly impacts the operations and profitability of your business. That’s why it’s crucial you think about an IT support strategy that protects your business from setbacks and allows you to focus 100 percent on improving business outcomes.

In this blog, we take a look at just how important IT support is to your business and the different price of each of the IT support service options available to your organization. 

What is the cost of downtime?

Downtime is a major challenge for small and medium-sized companies, and can have huge implications on their business, with downtime creating business disruption and decreasing employee productivity.

In fact, a report published on Techradar and carried out by Infrascale found that more than a third (37 percent) of SMBs in the survey group said they have lost customers and 17 percent have lost revenue due to downtime.

Nearly a fifth (19 percent) of SMBs admit that they do not feel that their business is adequately prepared to address and prevent unexpected downtime. 

Of those SMBs that said they feel unprepared for unexpected downtime, 13 percent said they do not feel their business is prepared for unexpected downtime because they have limited time to research solutions in order to prevent it.

More than a quarter (28 percent) attributed not feeling prepared for unexpected downtime due to IT teams at their organization being stretched. The same share (28 percent) said they don’t think their business is at risk from unexpected downtime. Yet more than a third of SMBs (38 percent) said they don’t know what the cost of one hour of downtime is for their businesses.

IT support service options and their costs

With the damaging implications of downtime in mind, It’s crucial that Ontario’s small and medium-sized businesses have a plan in place to keep their systems and network running consistently. 

Here are the top options, and how much they cost:

  1. In-house IT support

According to Payscale, the average base salary for an IT support specialist in Canada is $50,441. That may sound reasonable, but then you need to account for the cost of benefits, bonuses and any resources/tools they need to do their job effectively. 

And that’s not even taking into account that it takes a team of IT support specialists to keep your IT network running seamlessly, not just one employee.

When you start tallying all those costs, small and medium-sized businesses simply do not have the resources to hire an internal team of IT experts to keep their systems, hardware and network running as smoothly as needed. The cost simply becomes too much.

  1. Outsourced IT support

With in-house IT support far too expensive for the vast majority of small and medium-sized businesses, outsourced IT support offers a fantastic opportunity to access IT expertise, experienced technicians and a large team - all for a fraction of the cost of building an in-house team.

Unlike in-house IT support, outsourcing to a third-party will free up any expenses you would have to pay for internal teams such as training, benefits, in-house technologies and so much more. The price of IT outsourcing usually costs anywhere from $70 to $150 per user each month, but this obviously depends greatly on your company’s needs and requirements.

  1. Managed services IT support

IT support can also be monitored remotely through a managed IT services company. This is the same as outsourcing your IT support as it will be a service through a third-party, but a managed services provider will monitor your IT constantly - as opposed to an outsourced IT support provider which will only respond to calls as-and-when you require them. 

Managed IT service providers provide active monitoring of your IT needs and maintenance of servers, remote machines, and desktops that your business uses. In this agreement you are able to subscribe to the services you need at the moment, and add new ones as your company grows. 

Learn more about the cost and pricing models of managed IT services.

Do you need IT support services but don’t have the finances, resources and time to complete them in house? OT Group is here to help. We offer IT services along the Toronto to Ottawa Corridor. Book a call with us today, we’d love to hear your requirements and design a solution for the specific needs of your business.

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