IT support is expensive, but it’s necessary. If you run a church, you need effective support for your workstations, mobile devices, and public Wi-Fi environment. You can hire someone in-house, but most IT support people have specific experience that doesn’t expand into other areas like cybersecurity or monitoring. Large tech companies have multiple people to handle the many facets of infrastructure, but they also spend millions on staff. To get the same benefits without expensive staff, churches often turn to managed IT support. Here are a few ways having managed support with one or two local staff can improve your support and uptime.

In-House IT Pros and Cons

Even if you do decide to use managed services for IT, you likely still need at least one IT staff member to communicate with the provider’s staff. Local staff give church members a personal touch, and usually the IT staff member is right down the hall from church employees. Local IT support has its benefits, but it’s also costly to have even one staff member.

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The cost of a local IT support person depends on your location and benefits that you offer employees. Suffice to say, it costs at least six figures a year to have a single IT staff member between salary, benefits, real estate, vacation, time-off, and any additional expenses. Because a single staff member is at least six figures a year, you can understand how having several IT people to support a church can get quite costly.

Also, local staff members might push for local IT infrastructure. You need some infrastructure like network equipment, an internet service provider for a connection to the internet, and workstations for users, but many of the costly services can be moved to the cloud. Cloud infrastructure can be much cheaper, especially if you use more advanced technology like AI, security, logging, and storage. A more affordable solution is to have necessary infrastructure in-house while deploying cloud infrastructure for more expensive technology.

To sum it all up, here are the pros and cons of in-house technology support:

• Pro: A more personal relationship with IT support and faster assistance with issues.
• Con: Much more expensive, limited experience with only a few staff members, and limitations in scalability if the wrong hardware is deployed.

Managed IT Services

If you feel limited with choices in local IT support, another option is engaging a local managed service provider. A managed service provider doesn’t have a support person permanently at your location, but the service is still fast and available 24/7 to any church staff member with an IT problem. This disadvantage might seem less beneficial at first, but having local IT support from a managed service provider has several advantages that tip the scales in their favor.

First, let’s talk about costs associated with a managed service provider. You pay a flat fee every month to have the support services necessary for IT support. Every managed service provider has its own fee structure and various options. Most have plans that give you several support options in a contract that spans several months. A few options that you should consider a necessity include disaster recovery, a 24/7 help desk, patch management, onsite support, network management, cloud services management, and monitoring.

The 24/7 help desk is usually your first form of contact, and then you have tickets assigned for additional support. You might need onsite support for hardware failure, and an MSP will have a local technician come out to troubleshoot and remediate the issue. To have this type of support, you need a local MSP with offices in your city or in close proximity to your location. Onsite support sometimes comes at a costly addition to your contract, so ask service providers if it’s included before you sign.

The second advantage is the vast amount of professionals at your disposal. Instead of relying on a single person for IT support, an MSP has several experienced professionals within their own circle of knowledge. If you have a cybersecurity event, the MSP has cybersecurity professionals available to help detect, contain, and eradicate the threat. When you need backups and recovery, an MSP professional helps take care of each step for you. Having a managed service provider at your disposal saves time, money, and reduces the amount of damage to your business.

When you need help deploying cloud resources, an MSP can help. For example, suppose that you want to leverage artificial intelligence in your strategies. AI is too expensive to house locally, so you need a cloud service. An MSP can help deploy the necessary resources and show you what can be done with your new infrastructure.

Overall, the pros and cons of a managed service provider for your IT:

• Pro: Less costly, more efficient, and vast IT experience to help your church.
• Cons: No permanent onsite IT staff, which might be something you prefer.

Finding the Right MSP

Local MSPs are the best for any business, including churches, that need someone onsite. Your first step is to collect what you think is necessary for IT support, but the provider you contact will help determine the right pricing plan. The right pricing plan ensures that you have full coverage for any IT issue in the future.

Corporate Technologies has the professionals to help with your IT support, and we have locations across the country. Contact us today to find out how we can help.

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