Outsourced Server Support: When Does It Make Sense for Digital Agencies?

by Mike Ricotta - September 12, 2018

Keeping your server support in-house can be tempting, but outsourced server support can have undeniable advantages.

It’s a question on the mind of every growing digital agency: when do you transition to outsourced server support?

The business model of a digital agency is subject to change as the business scales. In the beginning, it makes the most sense to keep all support level tasks in-house. At this start-up stage of the agency life-cycle team members typically wear many hats in order to cover all the needs of the business. However, as the business grows, it is important to explore using third-party service providers for various non-core tasks. For example, as new team members are hired, the need for human resources administration becomes necessary. HR services are peripheral to the core business agenda of the digital agency but still very necessary. It may be that no one in the agency has HR experience or that clients demands prevent the agency from effectively handling HR internally. The mishandling of HR can quickly create issues that can drain resources, sabotage morale, and even lead to a lawsuit. In addition, the hour to hour cost of keeping HR services in-house is probably more expensive than outsourcing these services. The key to maintaining strong, sustained growth is to know when it makes sense to outsource various support services.

Similarly, if an agency specializes in custom development, it might make sense to seek free-lance design work or marketing. The most important question to ask relates to a company’s core competencies as related to long-term strategy. As mentioned above, in the early stages of the business life-cycle, it is important for team members to plug the gaps between the existing members’ skill set(s). As growth continues, business owners are faced with two options; hire new internal team members or look to external resources for gap coverage. Maybe a combination exists between the two? It might be wise to scale with an external resource initially and as growth continues, move to the creation of a permanent internal solution. The key to this decision-making process again centers around the idea of core competencies. Success will happen as long as the agency understands and focuses on its strengths. However, the tendency to assume you can do all industry related work well is far too common, especially in the digital marketplace. For example, great developers are not necessarily great digital marketers or UI experts and they probably don’t want to be. But, that doesn’t mean you should add a bunch of salaries to your payroll in order to be an all things to all clients agency. Very often, seeking external resources just makes more sense than a staff expanding internal solution. After all, payroll bloat is the greatest risk-factor for a growing agency.

As a managed services provider, Arcane Strategies specializes in client cloud support and monitoring. Our customers are digital agencies. Almost all, offer 24/7 cloud support to their clients as part of a monthly service agreement. In addition, almost all of our clients once fulfilled their client cloud support agreements in-house. But, as the grew, it simply made more sense to outsource this service. Explore our outsourced server monitoring services.

Our response time and issue resolution is much quicker than what they would be able to provide internally. This is because cloud server support is our core competency. We love this service. We love knowing that our clients can focus on the mission of their business and rest easy during the night knowing that their client’s businesses are protected from attack and potential downtime. Our clients no longer deal with midnight server alert calls and the workflow the following day as a result of extending on-call resources into the early morning hours. We respond to cloud server alerts immediately. We diagnose and resolve any issues while you do your work or get your rest, that’s it!

Successful businesses understand themselves, they know the right questions to ask, and they know when to take action. If client cloud support is a pain-point for your agency, please contact us today and request a free support consultation. We could help you with our outsourced server support needs – including outsourced server monitoring – and more.

Call Arcane Strategies to schedule your free one-hour consultation at 1-541-649-4508.

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