-
We live in an increasingly globalized world. When you’re looking for a service provider of any sort, you have a whole world of options – often quite literally. In the realm of IT support, you can pick any company in the country. Why not go with the best?
Well, there are drawbacks to just picking the “best” company you can find.
- They aren’t necessarily the best, just the most popular with a good review score.
- They likely charge a price befitting their reputation, which is more than you might otherwise have to pay.
- If they’re remote, they might not be able to handle your on-premises hardware or network as easily, or at all.
There are many tangible benefits to ignoring what people call the “best option” and going with a local option instead. As a managed IT company in New Jersey, we’re here to tell you that the best service we can provide is to other businesses in New Jersey. That’s not to say we won’t work with companies further away – we will – just that it becomes harder to do so effectively.
From the perspective of a business with IT needs (that’s you!), there are a bunch of great reasons to go with a local IT company. If you’re in New Jersey, that’s us. If you’re not, it’s a company local to you. So, what are those benefits?
1: Rapid Response
Working with a local company rather than a company located hundreds or thousands of miles away – or even overseas – means a fast response time when an issue occurs.
Modern business operates 24/7. People are visiting your website at all hours of the day and night, and they want to know that your services are operational any time they want to use them. That means ensuring that your systems are up and running at all times.
So, what happens if a server crashes, a critical application locks up, or an employee spills coffee on their laptop? You need to contact your managed IT services provider, wait for their response (which can take hours due to differing time zones), and then wait even longer for them to solve an issue. What are your customers going to do if that server needs in-person support and you have to wait for an IT tech to fly out? What is that employee going to do if they have to wait for a new laptop to be shipped, with days or weeks of transit time?
A local New Jersey company has a much faster response time. Instead of flying a tech out whenever plane schedules line up, we can just send someone in a drive across the city. Instead of overnighting a new piece of hardware, we can bring it with us. Your response times drop dramatically when you have local individuals on tap to handle issues that crop up.
2: Domestic Accountability
This one is primarily a concern for companies that are considering outsourcing their IT support to companies based overseas. Whether you’re looking at a provider in Switzerland, Ukraine, or India, you have a lot of different concerns, up to and including different laws on the handling and protection of data, physical data center security, and openness to government investigations.
When you work with a New Jersey-based IT company, you know we’re following local, state, and federal laws for data handling and compliance. You know we’re accountable to these laws and that we’re not accountable to foreign governments or agencies.
Sure, there are some reasons why you might want your business hosted on foreign servers, but you know if that’s relevant to you. For most businesses, working with a local company beholden to local laws is much better than navigating international rules and legalities, as well as international threats.
3: Awareness of Local Realities
Another excellent reason to work with a local New Jersey IT provider is our understanding of the realities of operation in New Jersey. It all matters, including:
- Geography. NJ is located centrally with easy access to major metropolitan areas like Philly, NYC, and DC. This presents both unique challenges and unique opportunities that a more distant service provider might not understand.
- Local Companies. We know and already have connections within the local ISPs, whether we’re talking about major providers like Verizon or smaller companies like Access One. Having connections beats trying to navigate an unfamiliar customer service line when an issue crops up.
- Local Regulations. Many regions, states, and cities across the country have their own laws, regulations, and even assumptions about how technology should be handled. By working with a local New Jersey provider, you know we’re already familiar with those most important to you.
The reality is, different cities have different atmospheres, assumptions, and cultures. When you’re working with one local to you, you know you’re on the same page, and you don’t have to navigate differences in culture and perspective.
4: Referral Partnerships
Another great benefit of working with a company local to you is partnerships. Want to network with another local business? Want to earn referrals for recommending your IT company? Want to simply be part of the larger overall local community? You can do all of these things when you work with a company local to you.
The key here is real relationships. When your only contact with your IT company is through phone calls and emails when something goes wrong, you don’t really build a relationship. On the other hand, when you work with a local New Jersey company, you might meet your tech at the grocery store, become friends with your account rep bonding over local sports, or even meet the CEO casually. We’re all friends here, and that’s not something you can get with a national chain or a distant company.
5: Community Support
While personal networking is great, working with local companies also helps support your local community. You support local jobs and local families. We all live in the greater New Jersey area, just like you. We’re part of the community, just like you.
Community support goes beyond the relationship we build with you. It extends to other relationships. Maybe we partner with a local hospital, and it’s the same one where your daughter was born. Maybe we support local initiatives to keep our streets clean. Maybe our interests align on various local political and social initiatives. It’s the little things that make a difference, that are difficult to define and impossible to get when you’re just paying some company out in California to do the work for you.
6: Keeping Money Local
Another important aspect of working with a local New Jersey company is that, for the most part, your money stays in New Jersey. You’re not just funneling your entire IT budget to some techies in Silicon Valley, helping the rich get richer. You’re supporting local businesses and local communities. Your payments are subject to local taxes, so your money stays helping local people.
When you love your city and your community, it’s worth it to do whatever you can to support it. Luckily, when you’re working with a local managed IT company, you’re not making sacrifices to do it. As this article so plainly conveys, working with a local company is all about the benefits, not the drawbacks.
7: On-Site Disaster Recovery
What happens if the worst happens? A fire, a snowstorm, a sudden windstorm; natural disasters happen all the time and are happening more regularly over time. What were once storm-of-the-decade weather events are now happening every year.
Can you trust a faceless company out in California or in Bangladesh to understand your unique concerns? Can you trust them to have your back, have preparations ready, and be able to get you back up and running no matter what happens? Probably not.
When you work with a local company like us, you know that we know what you’re going through. We go through it too. No matter what issues you encounter, from weather patterns to local ISP issues to construction breaking a critical fiber line, we’re right there with you. We know what your concerns are and how to navigate them.
8: In-Person Training and Setup
One of the best benefits of working with a local company is having local access to products and services. If you’re using a hybrid on-premises and cloud IT setup, or if you need training on how to use a new system, or if you need someone in person to configure your servers, we’re right there for you.
To an extent, this is part of our first point about rapid response times. Except, it’s more than just incident response. Training, services, installation, even one on one consultations can all benefit from direct, in-person communication rather than Zoom calls and phone conversations or, worse, impersonal emails.
And really, who wants to wait for some techie from San Francisco to come out and tell you how to do your job? It’s generally just better to have local individuals work with you to teach you how a new system works than it is to be reliant on the consultant hours from a company you’ll never see in person.
What You Get From New Jersey Managed IT Services
Everything above is abstract, and we know that can be difficult to quantify for some people. If we haven’t convinced you with the broad strokes, maybe we can convince you with a rundown of the services we offer. So, if you’re a New Jersey business and you want local IT support, what do you get when you go with us?
- Strategic consultations. We work with you to analyze your vision, your projected growth, and your business needs from the top-down and the bottom-up. We then convert that into an IT plan, including hardware, software, licenses, security, disaster recovery plans, and more. All of this helps guide both the near future and the next several years, to ensure that if anything gets in the way of your business’s growth, it won’t be your IT.
- Security. When your data is located in a New Jersey data center, you know it’s secure, with both top-of-the-line digital security and physical security to prevent any sort of intrusion. Backups, redundancies, and other features ensure that you’re never at risk of catastrophe on our end. You’re as secure as you can be against everything from cyberattacks to social engineering.
- Helpdesk and Support. We’re always available to be contacted for any issue, large or small. Servers running slow? Laptop on the fritz? Email not being delivered? The whole office down? No matter what it is, we can have a tech out and looking into it in a matter of minutes, not days.
- Preemptive Support. Our active monitoring dashboards and alerts allow us to monitor for everything from hardware health to power outages to software issues to server crashes. Often, we can fix those problems before your business or your employees even realize there’s a problem in the first place.
- Cloud Integration. The modern digital world is moving to cloud-based services. Whether you want an entirely on-premises infrastructure, a hybrid cloud-local setup, or an entirely cloud-based business model, we can help you set it up, configure it, train your employees on using it, and ensure that it runs as smoothly as possible.
- Customized Solutions. All too often, an MSP will simply put your company in a box, using preconfigured software and cloud applications to force you to adapt to their way of doing things. Not us; we help design a bespoke IT solution that works for your company, not our bottom line.
Your business can’t afford downtime. When you contract with a local New Jersey-managed IT support company like Computertech, you know you’re getting the best possible service and support you can. Whether you need a long-term strategy, short-term support, disaster recovery, incident response, or ongoing services, we’re here to provide what you’re looking for. Just reach out and contact us today for a free consultation, or if you have any additional questions or concerns. We’re standing by and ready to help you at a moment’s notice.
About The Author
Herman
Herman is the lead team member here at Computertech.com. He’s been in IT for over 20 years and has expertise in our various IT Services including Microsoft Azure, Microsoft 365, Microsoft Teams and even Computer Security.
No related posts.