Empowering Your School’s On-Staff IT With Co-Managed Services

IT challenges are becoming cumbersome and hard-to-navigate issues for school districts across the country. The need for technology to expand learning opportunities is more critical now than ever, as the world shifts to remote learning.

However, to accelerate digital transformation while balancing security, your on-staff IT team may be at the end of their bandwidth and in dire need of support. Co-managed services offer your school the ability to grow and adopt technology seamlessly and securely.

IT challenges every school district is facing

According to the 2019 K-12 IT Leadership Survey Report, the most concerning IT issues are:

• Cybersecurity
• Budget restrictions
• Interoperability
• Professional development
• Breaking down silos across departments

All these challenges create a perfect storm of school districts not being able to embrace the benefits of technology in the classroom and beyond. These issues are not unlike what other companies face as they attempt to execute on digital transformation.

Complicating this more is the fact that most districts don’t have the funds to hire additional IT professionals, meaning the on-staff team is stretched to its capacity. Now, your team is fighting to catch up with a shift to remote learning, which also means more concerns with data privacy, according to Education Week. Data privacy and security are especially troubling if you use in-house servers.

So, how can co-managed services eliminate and/or mitigate these challenges? Let’s dig deeper.

Co-managed services offer a reprieve for your overworked team

Co-managed services could be the solution you’ve been looking for to keep pace with technology needs. Acting as an extension of your team, co-managed service providers can offer you a variety of solutions.

Help desk support

Is your IT staff constantly behind on answering help desk support questions from teachers and staff? Accelerating responses is easy with unlimited IT support, getting everyone back to work faster.

Security-first approach

The world of cybersecurity is always evolving. It’s a moving target that requires a proactive plan, especially around managing patches and protecting your network. Offering a good defense is imperative to keeping your data safe, and that’s possible with 24/7 monitoring of all devices, servers, and applications.

Migrating and adopting the cloud

If you are still dependent on on-premise servers, you’re open to threats both from a security and an operational continuity perspective. Additionally, these servers are expensive and complicated to maintain and manage. By moving to the cloud, you’ll have a more secure network that’s always backed up and accessible to all your employees.

Hardware management

Hardware management across an entire school district can be huge and time-consuming. Your internal team may find it hard to keep things organized and to have a plan on how and when to upgrade. With co-managed services, your partner can help you ensure that you maximize investments.

Co-managed services offer a better way to budget

No matter the size of your IT budget, you probably agree that it’s not enough. But you can do more with less with co-managed services. You’ll pay a flat monthly rate that’s all-inclusive, allowing you to stretch and stay on budget.

Ready to empower your IT team? Contact us today to learn more about how we can help.