Hiring an IT Support team for your business can be a difficult choice, especially with so many options available. At Firewall Technical we try and make everything as understandable as possible when it comes to tech support and earlier this week we covered the advantages of an in-house IT support team.
Today we will be looking at the disadvantages of creating an in-house IT support team. By covering the advantages and disadvantages, you will decide if hiring an MSP or building your own tech support team is the best option for your business.
The disadvantages of an in-house IT support team.
For larger companies with bigger budgets, it’s easier to create a tech support team with all the qualifications and knowledge to tackle a wide variety of tasks which could indeed on the uptime of a business. For smaller businesses and startups there may not be the funding there to hire an experienced and well-rounded tech support team.
Having a smaller team is going to mean your in-house team has limitations and if a problem arises that your team have no experience in then your business is going to suffer downtime and you will need to hire external help anyway.
Another disadvantage of an in-house IT support team is that smaller companies can’t afford to pay their IT staff to work around the clock so generally support is only available between 9 am and 5 pm. If your business suffers downtime after that you will either need to call in an emergency IT support team or you will need to wait until the next morning to fix the issue.
Larger businesses don’t have a problem with IT support staff being off as they will have workers in teams that work shifts. Having IT workers ready to fix issues that may arise around the clock is a great way of keeping your business running and minimising downtime.
Having teams of IT specialists working all hours of the day is expensive and is often out of budget for smaller businesses.
Hiring an internal IT support team is always going to be more expensive than hiring a managed service provider as IT professionals can be costly so the ultimate choice when it comes to building an in-house IT support team may come down to the costs involved.
Another disadvantage of building your own in-house team is that recruiting for IT candidates can be expensive and also difficult to find. Many IT job roles are highly in demand so attracting the right talent for your business once again can be costly and if you are competing with another IT company that has a bigger budget you often find yourself on the losing end.
Tech support can also be a stressful job so you could face problems with your technical staff leaving, this starts the whole process of hiring again and finding the right candidate is difficult.
It can take months to recruit and train up an employee so when they leave it can be a stressful period for everyone involved. Losing staff also puts extra stress and workload on other members of your team which can lead to annual leave requests and more staff leaving your company.
Conclusion
There are many benefits of building your own IT support team in-house so you shouldn’t discount the idea, for many businesses it will come down to the budget needed to create a team that can handle the majority of tech support issues. For smaller companies, this may not be feasible and you will often find that small business will outsource their IT support and services to a managed service provider like us.
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Benefits of hiring an in-house IT support team.