The eye of the storm. That’s the position most IT departments find themselves in. We are just past the ruckus triggered by SMAC (social, mobile, cloud, and analytics), but not yet at the point where these things are completely known variables. For example, most businesses are just now sticking a tentative toe into the waters of big data, and a surprising number still haven’t taken the plunge into cloud adoption.

It’s an adjustment period. A time to take stock of the morale of the troops, assess resources, and plan for the future. Only your IT team can’t do much planning for the future because these well-paid, well-trained, highly-skilled professionals are busy with the mundane, humdrum tedium of running a data center. Answering the same user questions for the umpteenth time. Monitoring network traffic. Yawn, sigh, rinse, repeat.

Why don’t you breathe some new life into your IT department? Relieve them of the monotony by outsourcing the most basic IT functions, freeing them to be innovative, forward-thinking and, well, doing all that tech geek stuff you’re paying them for. Here are the best tasks to offload to IT outsourcing specialists so your tech team can get back to rocking out the technical genius.

1. IT Outsourcing Can Take On IT Security

Cyber security is much like bank security or hotel security. You train for years, practice for hours, and it all goes down in minutes. Doing your cyber security in-house means you’re paying top dollar for top talent to watch for nothing for countless weeks or months or years, until BAM! One day, something dreadful happens. Usually, they were asleep from boredom and missed the whole thing. Not really, but the point is, why pay folks to sit around waiting for the day that data breach may happen? Start putting your IT workers on productive assignments, and leave the security monitoring to IT outsourcing.

2. IT Outsourcing Can Handle Network Monitoring

This is much the same story as security monitoring. A whole lot of watching not much of anything. Network monitoring is essential for keeping user experience high and capacity planning. But it’s nothing an entry-level computer science graduate can’t handle. Put your network administrator to work on planning your network upgrade, and leave the network monitoring and basic troubleshooting to IT outsourcing.

3. IT Outsourcing Can Manage Data Center Operations

Running a data center is similarly mundane. There is some savvy involved in optimizing the data center for performance, but essentially it’s a whole lot of the same old same old. Data center operations that IT outsourcing can take on include managing email servers and similar responsibilities. Not only does outsourcing data center management free up your own IT staff, it’s also an excellent way to reduce the carbon footprint of your business, reduce waste, lower utility costs, and generally reduce the complexity of your IT infrastructure.

There are many ways in which IT managed service providers can lend a helping hand to all size businesses. Find out more when you download our whitepaper: Managed IT Services For Small Businesses.