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Outsourced IT

Technology is the backbone of virtually every business operation, IT challenges can significantly hinder growth and productivity. From frequent downtime to cybersecurity threats, these issues pose serious risks that can impact a company’s bottom line.

However, these problems are not insurmountable. With outsourced IT and the right managed service provider (MSP), businesses can navigate these hurdles effectively and efficiently.

Here are 23 of the most common IT pain points companies face that can be solved with outsourced IT and managed IT services.

Outsourced IT

Whether you’re considering an MSP to supplement your internal team or to provide comprehensive IT support, outsourcing your IT needs can offer flexible, efficient, and powerful solutions that directly address your IT pain points. This change not only lowers your total cost of ownership (TCO) but also brings about a significant return on investment (ROI), reduces risk, drives revenue, and adds value for your clients and stakeholders.

Reasons to Choose Outsourced Managed IT Support Services

  1. Frequent Downtime: Frequent IT issues and downtime can lead to significant productivity losses. It disrupts business operations, causing delays in service delivery and negatively impacting customer satisfaction.
  2. Cybersecurity Threats: Inadequate cybersecurity measures increase vulnerabilities to security threats and data breaches. Inadequate cybersecurity can result in substantial financial losses, damage to brand reputation, and potential legal implications.
  3. 24/7 Support Needs: Managing complex systems requires round-the-clock support and maintenance. Without it, businesses can face prolonged downtime, leading to customer dissatisfaction and revenue loss.
  4. Technology Upgrades: Keeping up with the latest technological advancements and industry trends is crucial for maintaining a competitive edge. However, it can be challenging without the necessary expertise and resources.
  5. Skill Gaps and Labor Shortages: Companies often struggle to fill highly specialized technology roles with the right skill sets. This results in increased labor costs and prolonged project timelines.
  6. Scalability Issues: As businesses grow, their IT infrastructure and resources must scale accordingly. Difficulty in achieving this can hinder growth, impact service delivery, and result in operational inefficiencies.
  7. Compliance Challenges: Compliance with regulations related to sensitive data confidentiality, retention, and standards is mandatory. Non-compliance can lead to hefty fines, legal issues, damage to business reputation, business dissolution, and personal liability.
  8. Outdated Systems: Inefficient and outdated software systems can cause operational bottlenecks. They can slow down processes, decrease productivity, and impact service delivery.
  9. Network Performance: Inconsistent network performance and latency issues can disrupt business operations, reduce employee productivity, and lead to customer dissatisfaction.
  10. Disaster Recovery Planning: A robust backup and disaster recovery plan is essential to safeguard critical data. Without it, businesses risk losing valuable data, which can have severe consequences.
  11. Systems Integration: Issues with integrating various systems can lead to data silos, making it difficult to gain a holistic view of business operations and hindering decision-making and strategic planning.
  12. Standardization: Lack of standardized IT processes and procedures can lead to inefficiencies, mistakes, and inconsistency in service delivery.
  13. Emerging Technologies: Implementing and leveraging emerging technologies can be challenging but is vital for staying competitive. Failure to do so can result in missed opportunities for improvement and innovation.
  14. Vendor Management: Managing multiple vendor relationships and varying service level agreements can be complex and time-consuming and expose a business to risk if not managed properly.
  15. Software Updates: Regular updates and patches are crucial for system security and performance. Difficulty in managing these can lead to vulnerabilities and system inefficiencies.
  16. Network Monitoring: Inadequate network monitoring can delay issue detection and resolution, leading to prolonged downtime and potential data loss.
  17. IT Expenses: Unpredictable or difficult-to-manage IT expenses can create budgeting challenges, affecting financial planning and resource allocation.
  18. Remote Work Challenges: Managing remote teams and ensuring secure access to company systems in a distributed work environment is crucial in today’s digital age. Failure to do so can lead to communication gaps, decreased productivity, and security risks.
  19. IT Strategy: The absence of a clearly defined IT strategy can hinder strategic decision-making, leading to missed opportunities and inefficient resource utilization.
  20. IT Support Costs: Rising IT support costs and inadequate support during off-hours can strain budgets and lead to unresolved IT issues affecting business operations.
  21. Device Management: With the rise in personal devices and smartphones accessing business systems, managing these devices becomes crucial to ensure security and system performance.
  22. IT Performance Visibility: Limited insight into IT performance due to inefficient monitoring and tracking can hinder decision-making and proactive issue resolution.
  23. Data Accessibility: Difficulty accessing or exporting data across multiple systems and applications can hinder data analysis, decision-making, and process efficiency.

By addressing these pain points with outsourced IT, businesses can enhance their efficiency, improve their security posture, and gain a competitive edge in today’s digital landscape.


Due Diligence Guide


In short, technology fuels business growth. Solve your technology roadblocks and build growth with the right IT partner. An experienced MSP brings the expertise, resources, and technological solutions needed to address these and other pain points—from boosting cybersecurity measures and enhancing network performance to ensuring compliance and facilitating technology upgrades.

By outsourcing IT to a trusted partner, you can focus on what matters most—growing your business. Embrace the benefits of outsourced IT and solve these challenges and build success.

White Glove IT Support

The term White Glove support gets thrown around in the managed service space, but what does it really mean? For Coretelligent, White Glove IT support is a foundational philosophy, a badge of honor, what drives us, and is one of the attributes that makes us stand out in the market space.

White Glove IT SupportCoretelligent delivers White Glove service centered around the specific needs of clients. We understand that a one-size-fits-all IT model does not fit most businesses. So instead, we collaborate with our clients to offer customized IT solutions and an exceptional level of support to help our clients meet their business objectives.

While other MSPs may claim to offer White Glove service, the difference is entirely in the details.

What Does White Glove Mean to Coretelligent?


Around-the-clock Support and Access to Experts

Our U.S.-based service desks are staffed 24x7x365 by our own engineers. We do not use an answering or dispatch service, so there are no gatekeepers or time delays in resolving any issues you may experience.

An Extension of Your Team

We organize our service desk into “Service Pods” which means that clients interact with the same core group of engineers familiar with their environment and people. We aim to build strong relationships for a successful long-term partnership and provide your firm with a deep bench of technical experts.

Communication and Partnership

With our service delivery model, each client is assigned a Customer Success Manager (CSM) responsible for managing the business relationship. Your CSM is focused on optimizing our service delivery and ensuring the satisfaction of your workforce. They are your primary contact for any account concerns or questions.

Proactive Strategic Vision

Other managed service providers (MSP) operate using a reactive model—meaning you interact with them when something breaks. The Coretelligent approach is more thoughtful and preemptive. We offer strategic guidance and proactive ownership of your IT operations. We meet with our clients to help them develop and navigate an IT roadmap designed to ensure the best technology solutions are in place for achieving business goals.

IT SupportIndustry-specific Knowledge

Our deep expertise in key industries leads to managed IT services that meet your critical business needs today while positioning your organization for future opportunities.

Having an industry-knowledgeable partner is critical for companies in highly regulated sectors. For example, Coretelligent is SOC2® certified, which is crucial for verifying proper security controls for certain industries like life sciences and financial services. Additionally, our SOC2® certification represents our commitment to offering top-notch security and IT best practices to our clients.

The VIP Experience

We offer concierge-like support for clients and users looking for that extra level of detailed support, including interacting with VIP users. As part of the onboarding process, we work with clients to understand the expectations of VIP users, how they like to receive support, and their communication preferences.

Full IT Lifecycle

Coretelligent offers a full suite of solutions and has extensive experience supporting growing companies. Not all MSPs can scale, but we can. Choosing a full IT lifecycle partner guarantees continuity as your business expands or shifts in response to the marketplace. Coretelligent is prepared to provide everything from 24x7x365 technical support and cloud computing services to strategic road mapping and comprehensive compliance and cybersecurity solutions.

Holistic and Flexible

Our philosophy is to provide the service offerings that our clients need. We don’t attempt to fit you into our box but rather design the level of service you require around your vision. Whether you require fully outsourced IT or a co-managed solution, we will work with you to meet your needs. Additionally, whether you work in an AWS or Azure environment, we will meet you where you are and not push changes that suit only us.

The opportunities are endless with Coretelligent’s white-glove approach to designing, implementing, protecting, and supporting your IT operations. Our world-class experts, specialized know-how, and the industry’s best customer service will help drive your company’s innovation, performance, profit, and growth. Reach out to learn more about Coretelligent and how our solutions can work for you.

9 Obstacles to Scalable Technology for Growing SMBs

Think About ItScalable technology is an area of regular concern for companies throughout the growth cycle, but it is a make-or-break-it concern for early- to mid-stage companies. At this point, the introduction of IT compliance requirements for privacy, data storage, cybersecurity, reporting, and more create a technology imperative that cannot be ignored. Due diligence requests from investors to determine a company’s viability combined with government-mandated compliance requires a serious assessment of an organization’s technology. And that means proving that your technology infrastructure can meet its current business needs and effectively scale as your company grows.


You can read more about the intersection of compliance and technology here (and specifically for  financial services here and life sciences here).


9 Obstacles to Scalable Technology for Growing SMBsScalable Technology is Mission Critical for Growth

In considering scalable technology solutions, it is essential to remember that IT functions do not exist in a vacuum but touch every aspect of business operations. In addition, the roots of technology extend further into operations as your company grows. IT impacts the success or failure of every function from quickly and seamlessly onboarding an ever-expanding pool of employees to implementing software to manage clinical trials and for your biotech startup or developing a technology stack that guarantees uptime for your investment firm. Leveraging technology’s power will become critical as your company progresses from startup to Series A and B.

Technology scalability can be defined as the range of a system’s ability to expand as demand changes. Anticipating how quickly storage loads can be increased or how databases will respond as new users are added are examples of gauging scale. Scalability is an almost constant operational concern but matters most during periods of rapid growth. The twin points of capacity and flexibility can be used to measure the scalability of any technology system.

Scaling technology should be viewed as an investment that reduces growth busting complexity and silos, includes flexible software and infrastructure, aligns with industry best practices, increases efficiency, and recognized as a revenue enabler and driver.

Taking a deeper dive, just what are some key areas of consideration for scaling technology for early-stage to mid-stage companies?

9 Factors for Delivering Scalable Technology

  1. Cloud Infrastructure – Cloud computing offers businesses the opportunity to realize cost savings, increase flexibility, and reduce complexity. However, things can get complicated as a business needs a scalable system. Out-of-the-box cloud services may no longer provide the required sophistication, and a customized mix of public, private, or hybrid cloud solutions is necessary. Increased spending will be needed to address additional processing, storage, and security requirements.
  2. Emerging Technologies – Be aware of developing technologies that could act as disruptors to your industry. For example, machine learning and AI have transformed various industries—some companies were ready to adapt, and some were not. Whether they deliver opportunities or challenges, emerging technologies can be significant game-changers that require a series of proactive steps or investments. For example, just think how different Blockbuster’s future could have been if they had only taken advantage of the industry-disrupting online DVD rental market sooner than they did.
  3. Avoid Data Silos – To the digital enterprise, data silos are anathema to growth, yet they are prone to develop as an organization scales. Therefore, as a company expands, it is essential to have a data management and governance program to address these silos before they become entrenched.
  4. Growing Employee Base – Your workforce is only as good as the technology it utilizes. From employee onboarding to performance management, your technology needs to seamlessly accommodate a growing workforce.
  5. Software Integrations – Be mindful of painting yourself into a corner with software applications and integrations as your organization scales. The scalable approach is to deploy a line of business applications with native support for integrations. These scalable business applications reduce the likelihood of data silos and the creation of time-consuming processes to counteract non-interoperability.
  6. Managing Collaboration – Collaboration is critical at any stage, but effective collaboration can suffer as an organization grows. A scalable collaboration platform should enable file-sharing and facilitate workflows seamlessly across a growing user base while protecting against security breaches.
  7. Building Processes – Document processes as your business scales to ensure a framework for producing repeatable and predictable results. Scalable processes can be executed quickly and efficiently as increased volume, more users, and greater complexity demands.
  8. Growing Necessity for Support – No matter your sector, planning for IT support is integral for your growing enterprise. As you add capacity, support can quickly become unwieldy or unresponsive and be a real stopgap to growth. As the number of users expands, the demands on an internal support team magnify. Planning for this challenge by outsourcing support to an IT partner will keep your firm on a growth trajectory.
  9. Increased Need for Cybersecurity and Compliance – Both cybersecurity and compliance increase in complexity as your company grows, especially in heavily regulated industries like financial service and life sciences. As a company progresses from startup to the funding stages, it needs to be prepared to take on the increased cybersecurity and IT compliance requirements that come with growth.

Leave Technology to the Experts

One solution for managing these scalability factors and optimizing growth is to focus on core competencies and leave the technology to the experts. A recent benchmarking study from Fidelity demonstrated that financial services advisors who outsourced reported higher growth. By outsourcing some or all your technology functions, you can focus on expanding your business and not your IT unit. Building in-house IT requires an enormous investment in both people and technology. Instead, choose the best scalable solution by partnering with Coretelligent to leverage our years of experience, industry-specific knowledge, and strategic technology advisors. Our scalable technology solutions will allow your internal teams to increase their focus on revenue-generating activities and achieving business goals.


Chris Messer, Chief Technology Officer at Coretelligent, HeadshotAbout Chris

As Chief Technology Officer, Chris Messer is a transformational and strategic IT leader who establishes and leads Coretelligent’s technical vision and technological development. Click here to learn more about Chris.

Client Portal

At Coretelligent, our CoreIQ Client Portal is an essential component of our service delivery. The CoreIQ Client Portal is a unified gateway that allows our clients to review their accounts, manage services, and interact with the teams at Coretelligent.

One of the qualities that sets Coretelligent apart is our responsiveness to our clients. To that end, our Coretelligent engineers routinely make improvements to the portal based on feedback from clients on their business needs and how they would like to interact with the portal.

Recently, we released some new improvements that included offering global per-client dashboards and reporting for all customers. This capability has been a popular request from many customers, and we are excited to bring this enhancement forward for our customers.

We have broken this Dashboard and Reporting feature up into two sections. First, dashboards consist of live views for a fixed period (30 days to start). Second, while Reports are static data exports from the dashboard for offline analysis, or that can be utilized for additional reporting or internal presentations.

Dashboards

There are currently four discrete dashboards that will be available within the CoreIQ portal.

Summary Dashboard (Executive Overview)

This dashboard contains a quick summary of each client’s environment, including, tickets, customer satisfaction (surveys), phone queue metrics, and server/network overview.

CoreIQ Client Portal – New Feature Announcement

Support Dashboard

Support Dashboard

This dashboard provides more granular detail for 360 Support usage via ticketing, SLAs, and phone queue metrics.

Infrastructure Dashboard

This dashboard provides detail around backups, server and workstation assets, top vendors/applications, and infrastructure asset monitoring.

Survey

Finally, the survey dashboard highlights the transactional survey responses and data from all support tickets for the organization. This feature allows clients to view feedback and responses from end-users on individual tickets.

CoreIQ Client Portal – New Feature Announcement

Reporting

Reporting

The reporting section offers the ability to export a monthly executive summary report snapshot of the dashboard data for further analysis or presentation.

Coretelligent Solutions

Our solutions include IT planning, 24/7/365 support, cloud computing, cybersecurity, disaster recovery readiness, and more. In addition, our team is available 24/7 to answer any additional questions you may have about any of our solutions.

Whether you need IT leadership, cybersecurity expertise, or a partner for your current IT team, we are here to help.

Reach out with any questions and learn more about how our IT solutions can support your business.