Benefits of IT Outsourcing - Global Edge

"Our support programs are designed to provide you with the capabilities of an entire IT department for less than the cost of retaining fulltime personnel."

Why Outsource?

When businesses outsource most of their IT needs to Global Edge, they enjoy a better level of service and overall lower costs than they would by retaining full-time employees to meet these needs. Using expert consultants for IT outsourcing throughout Alberta: Calgary, Red Deer, Edmonton, Lethbridge, Grande Prairie and beyond, we can save businesses thousands of dollars. There are only two IT needs that a business might be better off having fulfilled by in-house employees: 1) Many businesses utilize custom-built applications and/or databases that require upgrades and report writing. In these cases it makes more sense for a business to hire one or more in-house programmers to constantly work with these applications. 2) For businesses employing more than 200 computer users, it is advantageous to hire one or more in-house technicians for desktop support and help desk services.

Other than these two positions, all other IT-related needs (including consulting, strategy, infrastructure management, upgrades, and repairs) should be outsourced to focused consultants like Global Edge who can provide expert IT support in Alberta, as well as technology consulting in the Calgary & Edmonton metro areas, Red Deer county, and select cities in Northern and Southern Alberta. Our highly qualified experts provide the network support Alberta and Calgary metro area businesses have counted on for years. We provide the computer support Alberta companies prefer.

Here are just some of the many advantages of outsourcing your IT to Global Edge:

We have a staff of 20 employees.

With Global Edge, you don't just get an "IT person." You get an IT division. We provide our clients with CIO-level consulting, expert engineering, a help desk, a purchasing department, staff training, systems management, and the list goes on and on. Our support programs are designed to provide you with the capabilities of an entire IT department for less than the cost of retaining fulltime personnel.

More cost effective.

In today's market, many businesses are not experiencing the growth of days past. During significant growth years, many business hired fulltime personnel in order to assist the constant IT changes that occurred to support the company's growth. In today's market, it is common for a full time IT individual that may have had 40 hours per week worth of work to do in the past, to only have 10 hours of actual work to do today. In most cases when business revenues are level or diminishing, the internal IT person is tasked with simply keeping things running efficiently, but isn't tasked with making any significant improvements, upgrades, etc. In these scenarios, it is far more cost effective to outsource these functions to a company like Global Edge who can provide only those 10 hours of service that are actually necessary.

More IT Resources.

Many businesses believe that it's necessary to retain fulltime personnel to have someone there "just in case" for when things go wrong, but most fulltime IT personnel are not best prepared to handle emergency situations. Fortunately, modern computer systems rarely go down, but when they do, fulltime employees typically take far longer than Global Edge's engineers to resolve problems because they have never seen the problem before, and have only their own knowledge and resources to work through the issue. This sometimes leads to outages lasting days or even weeks. Global Edge's engineers not only possess far more experience troubleshooting diverse issues, but they also have vast resources to tap into. Each of our engineers can leverage our Global Edge team of IT professionals if they themselves don't have the answer to a particularly tricky issue. We have immediate access to the top systems engineers at Microsoft, in addition to all of the major manufacturers including Barracuda, IBM, HP, Dell, Toshiba, Sonicwall, Symantec and Cisco.

Smooth ongoing IT upgrades.

Projects involving upgrades to systems, when performed by fulltime personnel, are the most expensive and least resourceful way to go and often result in the most downtime. This is because, in most cases, fulltime personnel have never actually performed the upgrade before, and also have little (if any) experience with these new products in real world production systems. They often spend months researching options and learning about the new products at the expense of your company. Between the research, the poor execution, the downtime, and the cleanup pains, your project has exceeded the necessary cost by a factor of many times. As an alternative, the Global Edge staff performs many migration and/or implementation projects every month so you'll know that your upgrades will go effortlessly, on time and on budget.

Consistency.

With fulltime personnel, knowledge of your systems rests in the hands of a few, or even just one person. Our system discovery processes ensure that all needed information is documented and available to your assigned support team at all times. In addition to that, each of our clients is assigned 3 different technical resources, as well as 2 other non-technical resources, who get to learn your business very well. Therefore, if we have turnover with a single individual from our staff, you can rest assured that between our consistent documentation processes as well as redundant staff that is assigned to your account, little, if any, knowledge is lost when we turnover a staff member. Business owners know what difficulties result from the turnover of their IT staff. By outsourcing to Global Edge, these problems will go away forever.

24 / 7 support.

When members of your fulltime staff are sick, or on vacation, it often creates a myriad of problems for the rest of your staff when things go wrong. Global Edge is always able to provide the help you need when you need it, even on a 24x7x365 basis.

Key systems upgrades done after hours.

When systems engineers are hired by a company fulltime, they are frequently required to work during the company's regular business hours (Monday through Friday from 8 am to 6 pm, for example). When it comes to working on server and network systems, regular business hours is the worst possible time to make changes, and thus fulltime personnel don't have the opportunity to do the most important work during their regular working times, and have to come in nights and weekends to make those changes. Some engineers don't want to work late hours, on top of their regular schedules, so server and network maintenance and projects often go ignored, or are rushed through. At Global Edge, all of our upgrade and implementation project work is done outside of your normal business hours, and we carefully schedule our service teams so they can be at their best performance level during these times.

A full team of support.

Our Technology Managers provide the dedicated consulting and strategic support that fulltime personnel are not able to fulfill. Our consultants possess vast experience in every conceivable industry and can tap into each other's experience as a team.