Internal IT department VS outsourced IT support

There are many benefits to not having your own internal IT department, and instead, outsourcing the support you need for IT. And you can imagine that we at Cultrix would say that, as specialists in the provision of that outsourced IT support we are talking about.

Cost

One of the biggest benefits is cost. Having an internal IT department can vastly outweigh the cost of an outsourced department. According to Total Jobs the average salary for an IT support technician is £27,000 a year, with the higher rate of salary being around £33,000 per year. In contrast, we could support 175 desktop workstations, and eight servers at the cost of just under £26,000 per year, including VAT.

Please note these costs are ballpark figures, and have been rounded up. The actual cost will vary depending on other equipment, such as servers, which haven't been included in the above estimate. Any discounts or offers we may have available at the time have also not been included. For an actual quote please contact Dawn on 01226 736673, or email her on dawn@cultrix.co.uk.

As you can see, from the workstations figure alone, having a single IT support technician internally is vastly more expensive than an outsourced IT helpdesk. This statement is true up to 200 workstations where anything over this is when the cost starts to run at a similar level. But for a lot of organisations, perhaps yours included, 200 workstations is more than sufficient.

Cultrix provide everything to do with your IT. Not just an outsourced IT desk but everything from broadband to telecoms, from hosted email to cloud hosting - on the Cultrix Cloud platform. To build these services internally would be very expensive, particularly when it comes to cloud services.

Outsourced IT services, even beyond the helpdesk and support such as email and website hosting, are generally more cost-effective and reliable from your IT support provider too. Keep in mind that all these comparatively insignificant costs in contrast to the salary of your internal IT man may seem small but can all add up to a cost that for most organisations just isn't necessary.

People power

With Cultrix you have the benefit of having multiple technicians to hand. We currently have five people on our helpdesk, and technicians on the ground up and down the country on standby if we need to be onsite in an emergency.

What this means is that you have access to a wider pool of knowledge. With our combined experience there's almost no problem we haven't seen before. Certainly nothing we can't handle.

Furthermore, having a single IT support technician internally means if a disaster happens (and they do, computers are machines with moving parts) an internal technician can only deal with one request at a time. At Cultrix there's always someone on hand to take your call and deal with your issue there and then.

Our IT 'superheroes' (as we like to call them) have also earned a five star customer service rating on Google. You can read some of our fantastic reviews simply by searching for Cultrix within Google. You wont ever get a grumpy advisor with Cultrix. Many of the problems that might stress out an individual internal technician on their own, we handle with ease and take in our stride.

Infrastructure

There's more cost to a member of staff than just their salary. There's the obvious stuff such as tax, sick leave, employee benefits (for example health insurance and so on), time and an increased load on HR but there's also the tools they need to do their job efficiently.

Almost all of these tools come at a cost. At Cultrix we use a ticketing system to ensure all our customer request are dealt with quickly and efficiently. Giving priority to issues that prevent you from working means we can get you up and running as quickly as possible.

With our ticket system you will have access and see all the support tickets your organisation has raised with us and you can see the audit trail. You can see information such as response times and feedback from people within your organisation in regards to our customer service. Another benefit of an outsourced IT desk from Cultrix.

Beyond this we also have our proactive system monitoring software. This is a tool we use internally to monitor the critical elements of your PC and constantly check for any potential problems before they become a real issue, and prevent you working. We also have a blog post about our proactive system monitoring for you to check out if you'd like to learn more.

All these tools are great, and are almost essential for any IT department to run efficiently and effectively. But, if your IT department is internal it's more of a cost for your company to endure, as opposed to something that's included in the price if you choose Cultrix.

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