As businesses become more complex in their operational capacity, more and more staff may be needed in order to keep up with the daily tasks therein. 

This can be a positive sign and something of a milestone for your business, as expanding is usually a good indicator of good re-investment and the financial justifications to do so. Yet sometimes, it can be hard to know if your business should make that jump into hiring staf.

For instance, how many staff do you need before hiring a HR professional is necessary? Usually, every 16 or so staff members, and a professional of this nature must be hired. This is a relatively easy calculation to make at least.

But what if you hope to expand and refine your IT infrastructure? When that happens, you need someone to watch over your servers, apply cybersecurity updates, make sure you’re in-line with compliance necessities, and help you eliminate downtime while also integrating new upgrades, such as moving your storage solutions into a cloud computing framework.

But when is the right time for this to happen? It’s not always easy to say. In this post, we’ll discuss a few metrics you can use to identify that:

What are Your IT Needs?

Depending on the size of your team and how online your business is, your IT needs may differ. But even if you have a relatively small team attending to physical appointments, gone are the days of tracking everything in paperwork and filing cabinets. Your digital file cabinets and cloud computing accessibility, as well as generating user profiles for your staff, is an essential prospect in becoming a better business. Figuring out the scope of your IT needs can help you identify the scope of an IT professional’s job.

Is Now the Right Time?

If moving offices, upgrading your infrastructure, or refining your workflow, now might be a good time to bring in IT help. But is now the right time for a new hire? Are you planning to expand your business? IT help must be integrated into your future plans, not brought on as a last-ditch consideration.

Do Better Solutions Exist?

In 2021 and beyond, it might be that bringing a singular, full-time, IT professional to monitor your network is not only less than cost-effective, but it may eschew cheaper, better options on the market.

More and more, companies are beginning to eschew the necessity of hiring in-house IT staff and instead outsourcing their IT infrastructure, IT disaster planning, storage, web hosting, and cybersecurity to trustworthy and 24/7 operational managed IT services. 

With these professionals to hand, you gain the function of a whole, expertly qualified team of IT professionals looking over your business from their data center 24/7. This empowers them to leverage the power of computing in offering every provision to your business, from eliminating unnecessary server downtime to ensuring security patches and cybersecurity compliance is afforded as a basic necessity.

In this way, expansion is not only a possibility, but a utility afforded to you when and where you desire. This can help you avoid worrying about onboarding an entire employee, and instead making sure that an entire service has every one of your IT needs fully accommodated.