If you are an entrepreneur starting up your own business or an established business seeing flat sales and an inability to break into mobile search engine rankings you may be a candidate for hiring a vCIO.
What Does a vCIO Do?
For startups and other small or medium-sized businesses concerned with costs and compliance, a vCIO does all the things that an in-house CIO does:
- Plans the IT budget
- Analyzes and reworks business processes while also facilitating technology changes
- Deploys new software and maintains software through the application of patches
- Helps clients plan for future technology needs and goals
- Focuses on alignment of IT and the business
Basically, a vCIO is essentially an outsourced IT department. That makes outsourced IT a business decision.
What Are the Advantages of Outsourcing IT?
Outsourcing IT means your IT is a ‘managed service.” When you outsource with an experienced company you find the following benefits:
Scheduled maintenance is done at a time when your workforce will not be inconvenienced, usually in the evenings after your business closes or on weekends. To do this with your own IT people requires overtime or your people will be unable to work – neither is a sound financial practice. In some companies, this may mean the first time critical patches are installed.
While doing scheduled maintenance is a cost-saver with managed IT services, there are other big money items that are reduced or eliminated by managed IT services. These other reduced expenses include:
- Minimal expense for hardware as it is often included in a managed IT service agreement; and
- Minimal software expense as the vCIO provides your software on a subscription basis too. These two items are more than cost avoidance; they allow you to expense instead of amortizing these IT costs.
Other benefits of an outsourced managed IT service provider include:
- Disaster readiness – your virtual CIO can expertly assess your IT system for weaknesses that can be corrected and develop a recovery plan should disaster strike.
- Access to Experts – no matter where you are or how big or small your business is, a vCIO gives you the expertise needed to keep your IT systems running at their best.
- Accountability – rather than asking Phil, your accounts payable clerk, to check for patches on your system (Phil got the auxiliary and unpaid job of your firm’s IT guy by happenstance and not expertise) you have a vCIO that institutes best practices and drives the IT segment of your company to enhance meeting organizational goals.
- Allows your management team to be freed from IT tasks they don’t understand or want to do so they can focus on the aspects of your business you hired them to be responsible for.
Alvarez Technology Group is the trusted choice when it comes to staying ahead of the latest information technology tips, tricks, and news. Contact us at (831) 753-7677 or send us an email at [email protected] for more information.
