You Can’t Solve Your IT Staffing Problem with Technology

The biggest problem in many IT departments isn’t technology; it’s people. There just aren’t enough of them. Hiring and retaining quality IT personnel is difficult given the high demand.

There are some technical approaches to this problem that offer some help. Automation eliminates the routine manual work, but it requires someone to write and test the automation scripts, which isn’t always simple. It also means that when the automated processes fail, fixing the issue falls to staff who are now less familiar with the technology because they aren’t working with it every day. Finding the balance between failing to alert and alerting too often isn’t straightforward, either.

Artificial intelligence is starting to be added into data center support tools, but is still novel and the benefit is uncertain. If your environment is different from the environment where the AI was trained, its insights may not be relevant.

Using cloud greatly reduces the amount of support required from in-house IT teams, as the cloud provider’s staff handles a portion of the routine staff. However, data center teams remain responsible for their own applications in Infrastructure and Platform as a Service. Supporting these platforms is often complicated by limited visibility and limited expertise with this new technology.

So the solution to the problem of not enough people isn’t more technology; it’s more people. The best way for business IT teams to get those additional people isn’t by hiring them directly. Instead, businesses should look at IT consulting and managed services as an efficient way to add skilled personnel to their teams.

How Managed Services Can Help

Using managed services eliminates the challenge businesses have in attracting and retaining staff. In addition, managed services brings several other benefits:

Expertise. The IT employees of a managed services provider have gained experience working with technology for multiple clients. This gives them a deeper understanding of the benefits and challenges of a technology than someone working on an internal IT team. In addition, because they’ve often seen how technology is applied in multiple industries, they have a broader perspective and new ideas on how technology can provide you benefits.
Access to new technology. Introducing new technology is often slow because internal IT teams need to be trained and gain experience in supporting the tech before it can be broadly rolled out through the business. By virtue of working with multiple clients who use a variety of technologies, a managed services provider can assign experienced personnel to any new technology initiative at your business. The learning curve and ramp up time is vastly shortened.
Cost savings. Employees of a managed services provider aren’t your employees. That means you save money on the overhead and benefits associated with adding someone new as a member of your team.

If you’re ready to solve your IT staffing problem, contact CCS Technology Group.