Why Reactive IT Support is Becoming Obsolete

Many businesses are making the switch from reactive IT support services to proactive IT support, which comes primarily in the form of managed IT services. Why is this happening? Well, it seems the “break-fix” approach just isn’t working for most SMB enterprises anymore. A great many of those SMBs are opting instead for proactive IT support for many reasons, which we’ll outlay for you below.

1. Reactive IT support is more costly. Managed services, which offer proactive support, streamline and economize the costs of IT support, as opposed to reactive support. Proactive IT support, a.k.a. managed IT services, present a fixed, predictable billing rate, as opposed to billing you for each support call individually. This allows business owners to budget sensibly rather than dealing with unexpected bills when tech problems arise. This also benefits enterprisers by not having to send out engineers and technicians on-site. Reactive support, on the other hand, hits you with unexpected bills, and sometimes including unexpected fees.
2. Reactive support is less convenient. Proactive support runs 24/7/365, whereas reactive support is not ongoing, or continuous in nature. Reactive response time following a network fault takes time. This lag in response time can hold back your workplace productivity. Also, the break-fix approach only responds to the most severe problems first, and focuses on one issue at a time. This makes the process much slower and harder to get ahead on things of lesser importance in the chain, but which are still relevant. The proactive model recognizes all issues first, then assigns bigger problems to more high-skilled resources. This creates a more fluid, scalable system where resolution can be quickly achieved on a wide variety of issues. Proactive support can also fix multiple problems simultaneously in this way. With multiple levels of on-site and remote IT support available, proactive wins in responsiveness and convenience.
3. Reactive support is unpredictable and, ultimately, unreliable. By taking the reactive approach, it’s never completely clear how reliable the help you’re going to get is. You can spend a lot of money fixing your broken computer, only to have it break again. So, you call up another IT specialist and go through the process all over again. And if you want to hire or train your own IT staff member, that can break your budget. With the proactive approach, you are provided support developed from extensive experience and knowledge which is guaranteed to perform efficiently every time a problem arises.

Get Proactive IT Support Now

If you are concerned that you and your enterprise aren’t getting the level of IT support you deserve, then contact an IT consultant with Interplay, which is a leader in proactive, managed IT services. Call us at (206) 329-6600 or send us an email at support@interplayIT.com , and we will be happy to answer any of your questions or provide you with a comprehensive IT consultation.