IT innovation forms the core of many businesses, allowing them to better reach customers, communicate, and stay competitive. These benefits, however, are not without cost. Managing complex, burgeoning IT projects can be a burden on staff, finances, and growth, and doing so without the requisite expertise or understanding will only exacerbate these issues.

As a result, hiring an outside party to help plan and execute your IT projects will almost always result in a better outcome. Hiring IT project consulting services can contribute in several key ways that general project managers and in-house IT departments are unable to.

Keeping Projects on Track

In-house IT projects often take longer to execute than initially intended, extended for months or even years due to unforeseen circumstances and costly mistakes. For an IT project consultant, however, those circumstances will be entirely predictable. They will have worked with dozens of clients on projects across a range of configurations and seen almost every roadblock. They can apply the lessons learned from other organizations to yours, producing an accurate and feasible plan that is effectively tracked and reported.

Improving Business Efficiency

IT consultants have the tools and knowledge to effectively assess your business, spot its weak points, and architect a technological solution that fits your infrastructure and workflow. They understand that a good solution that is poorly integrated can end up causing more harm than good. Instead, they will help to streamline your business and IT processes to make employees more productive and less stressed.

Project Consulting Can Provides an Outside Perspective

Internal project managers are an invaluable asset. They’re experts in their specific niche and are intimately familiar with the company’s objectives, employees, and day-to-day processes.

Sometimes, however, these very aspects can become a hindrance. When you are too close to a project it can be difficult to see where the real issues lie. When you do identify a problem, office politics can come into play, with different parties pointing fingers and bringing their own bias to the table.

Conversely, by hiring outside IT project consulting services, those external consultants provide a more objective and distanced look at a situation. They’re as close to neutral ground as you can get, and are therefore a natural antidote to office squabbles and tunnel vision.

Cutting Costs

The biggest barrier to hiring an IT consultant is usually the cost. Only the largest companies have the need for a permanent consulting team. External consultants can be contracted for a defined period without the additional costs of company benefits or the productivity loss of office chit-chat. They get paid only for the hours they work and can be wholly concentrated on the project at hand.

Despite this, they bring the same financial benefits. As well as providing direct savings by spotting redundancies and ensuring projects don’t go over budget, they can indirectly affect profits by:

• Bringing new enthusiasm to struggling projects
• Easing the burden on existing project members, allowing them to be more productive
• Transferring invaluable knowledge to existing IT staff
• Executing your project in a way that’s best suited to your business strategy

Choosing VirtuWorks for Your IT Project Consulting

As an MSP with over 25 years of experience, VirtuWorks has gathered some of the best engineers and IT consultants in the business. When you choose us for IT project consulting, we’ll use a series of meetings and consultations to plan a design that works for your business. You’ll then receive a dedicated project manager who will keep your project running smoothly, as well as track the project’s progress and provide regular reports. Finally, if something goes awry, VirtuWorks’ experienced staff will be available for on-site intervention.

Contact VirtuWorks today to learn more about keeping your project cost-effective, on track, and aligned with your strategic goals.

Computer networks, whether on-prem, cloud, or hybrid, are a core part of almost every modern business. A well-designed network allows employees to be productive and clients to stay happy. Unfortunately, they’re also complex and that complexity tends to increase over time. A simple setup for a couple of founders can easily spiral into a behemoth as the company grows, spiraling across various geographical regions or countries with extensive virtual infrastructure and a wide variety of services, apps, employees, and devices.

What’s more, networks are in a state of constant change. Changes in where and how employees are working, the businesses’ activities in any given month, security threats, and more all have an additive effect on performance and configuration requirements.

Unsurprisingly, many businesses are unable to commit the resources to keep their network running smoothly, despite the huge impact it can have on their bottom line. Even ignoring the cost of financing industry software and a dedicated IT operations team, tangible skills shortages make it difficult to find engineers with the necessary expertise.

As a result, it’s becoming increasingly sensible for organizations to pay a Managed Service Provider (MSP) to take care of their network for them.

The Benefits of an MSP Partnership

MSPs aren’t just investing in networking personnel and software as an aside – it’s at the core of what they do. An MSP will have some of the best network engineers in the business with hundreds of years of combined experience across a wide range of configurations.

Due to their extensive personnel and software investment, MSPs can also offer services that you would be unable to support on your own or would be unable to offer outside of business hours. This typically results in the following benefits:

• Less downtime: An MSP will likely monitor your firewall, routers, printers, switches, and wireless network 24/7 and be ready to respond as soon as an issue arises with remote or on-site support. You don’t have to wait for employees to get into work in the morning and notice the issue – it’ll already be fixed by the time they arrive.
• Improved security: DDoS, ARP poisoning, and other cyberattacks are detectable through network traffic in their early stages. A competent MSP has the capabilities to detect and stop these attacks before they cause damage. Just as vitally, they will ensure that the software and firmware of your network-connected devices are up to date and secure.
• Fewer intermittent issues: Good MSPs excel, not just in preventing extended downtime, but also short-lived downtime and slowdowns. This is because they have the resources to perform proactive maintenance to prevent issues before they develop.
• Predictable billing: The reality of network management is that costs are never stable. The amount a company spends per month can vary dramatically depending on the tasks performed, whether emergency intervention is required, and various other factors. An MSP weathers this instability for the customer by typically charging a flat, fair monthly rate that makes budgeting simple.
• The freedom to be creative: If a business is struggling to stay on top of its current network, it’s less likely to trial new additions and its IT staff have less time to help employees use their tools effectively and creatively. Outsourcing your network to a reputable MSP affords the peace of mind that no matter what you do, experts will have your back.

Partnering with VirtuWorks

With 25 years under its belt designing, implementing, and supporting systems of all sizes, it’s fair to say that networking is VirtuWorks’ forté. Providing Managed IT Services with a team of over 25 highly skilled engineers, security experts, and IT consultants, you can trust that your technology investment is in very capable hands..

Reach out today to learn more about how we can keep your network stable, secure, and cost-effective.

Microsoft Azure Services are incredibly powerful tools for IT professionals and developers. By tapping into Microsoft’s global network of data centers, they can create, deploy, and manage applications in a hybrid cloud environment that are highly available while being cost and resource-efficient.

The can of that statement can’t be emphasized enough, however. What’s often not discussed is how much your Azure experience can vary depending on who you choose as your Azure Services Provider. Choose a partner with a poor support team, pre-packaged offers, or mediocre monitoring infrastructure, and you may find yourself paying far more than you expected with fewer benefits than you imagined.

While some providers market packaged offers, that are essentially a one-size-fits-all mentality, as a selling point, at VirtuWorks we believe it’s far from that. While a packaged offer can make budgeting simpler, it also means that there’s a distinct possibility you’ll end up overpaying for your service.

Further, it typically means that your provider either hasn’t invested in, or hasn’t made available the tools needed to monitor your data consumption on a granular level. This ultimately means that you lose visibility and control. You’re unable to see how much money you’re wasting and whether you’d be better off with a different provider.

With Azure Services and More, VirtuWorks Does Things Differently

In its mission to provide customers with unbeatable value, VirtuWorks has invested heavily in the creation of bespoke tools that let us determine your granular data consumption. As a result, when you partner with VirtuWorks there are no bundles, no packages – we bill you for data you use, and nothing more.

In the interest of accountability, planning, and monitoring, this information is passed on to the client. Our MSPControl portal lets you see how much data you have spent on each Azure service in any given month, including the Azure app service, cognitive services, recovery and backup services, and more. We even show you this on a per-day level so that you can make data-driven decisions surrounding your usage.

Of course, the fear most people have with usage-based billing is that they’ll inadvertently blow past their budget. As a result, we allow admins to set hard and soft usage caps, as well as budget alerts. These are further informed by a spending forecast so you can adjust habits well in advance.

All of this is backed up by the VirtuWorks team of over 25 expert engineers, consultants, and security experts, who help you get what you want out of your services while being there to aid with any potential disruptions.

So, whether you’re looking to provision virtual machines, host a DNS domain, create apps, or manage your IoT, reach out to VirtuWorks today. We’ll help you do it in an efficient, fair, and cost-effective way.