If you’re looking into managed IT services in London, there are of course a huge number of managed service providers to choose from.
If you’re wondering how much technical support would be likely to cost your business, it’s actually trickier than you may have thought to find an exact or even an estimated price. That’s because many firms are reluctant to display their charges and even when they do, it can be quite tricky to compare the prices of different suppliers and providers. To be fair, prices will be very individual since customers’ business needs can vary significantly according to their technical knowledge and requirements. Often, pricing depends on how long and how challenging most site visits end up being as well as on the quality of the management team.
Another factor when it comes to the price of IT support, especially in London, is location; prices for managed IT support tend to be at their highest in Central London and come down in cost the further you get out of the city. All of which means it’s really only possible to come up with a very rough figure without contacting IT companies directly. But bear in mind that any kind of business IT support is going to set you back at least £100 a month. Anything less simply isn’t worth most managed service providers’ time. So if that’s over your budget, you should be looking at a local PC repair guy and not an IT support agreement or managed service, at least for now.
The Average Costs of Monthly IT Support
Though as mentioned, the costs of managed IT support can vary massively, it costs between £70 and £200 a month to support an average server in terms of labour costs.
For each desktop, the cost is somewhere between £20 and £90 pounds a month per desktop and it can be more if the PC is a particularly old one, or if the user’s technical knowledge is very shaky. Hourly rates for support engineers are in the region of £90 to £200. And while lone PC repair technicians can be a lot cheaper initially, they often don’t have the experience to support a business network.
So, what can be done to keep these costs to a minimum? Here are a few pointers:
- Keep your equipment up to date – you should have a cycle of three to four years and ideally plan to replace infrastructure every three cycles.
- Keep systems tidy, network equipment clearly labelled and dispose of any obsolete equipment promptly.
- Strike a balance between being at the cutting edge of technology and running software that’s simply too old to be up to the job.
- Don’t try and do anything too clever unless you have a very strong business case for doing so. It’s typical to have a PC or Mac per person and a file store on-site with everything else in the cloud.
If you would like to know more about how we at Good Choice IT could help you with a managed IT service, contact us on 020 8099 5540 for a no-obligation quote tailored to your business needs.