Find the Best New England IT Consultant [Updated for 2023]

Modern technology offers serious benefits to businesses looking to outpace their competition and increase productivity, but it’s difficult to manage and run a business while keeping your thumb on the pulse of modern IT. On top of that, organizations of all shapes and sizes have had to contend with the growing threat of cyberattacks, as that landscape has vastly shifted over the last several years. It’s a good practice for any organization to meet with an IT consultant at least once a year. Let’s take a look at what New England businesses have as far as options, and go over some key features to look for.

Computer Repair vs Managed IT Services vs IT Consultant

What’s the Difference, and What’s Better For My New England-Based Company?

These words often get thrown around a lot, and there is a lot of confusing jargon that all kind of sounds like it means the same thing. First, let’s break down how these different types of IT companies conduct their business, and which type tends to work best for different types of organizations

New England Computer Repair/Support Companies

Generally, these types of organizations offer exactly what it says on the label: they repair computers and troubleshoot computer-related problems. In our industry, we have a nickname for these types of businesses—we call them break/fix companies. They wait for something to break, and for you to call them up, and then they charge you to fix it.

You might think that’s a perfectly reasonable model, and yes, it works for a lot of cases if the thing that is being fixed wasn’t mission-critical. If your dishwasher at home breaks down, you can call someone up and have it fixed, and they send you a bill. In the meantime, most households can get by doing dishes in the sink. It’s more work, but it’s something most families are completely capable of surviving without a lot of stress. 

Your company’s computers, however, are likely a little more vital to your day-to-day operations. They also would benefit from ongoing maintenance, whereas the typical appliance tends to function fine with minimal attention. 

That’s why the IT industry has shifted over the last decade—computer repair isn’t a sustainable model for most businesses, as they just end up throwing money at problems. These problems come back, and only cost more money because the proper maintenance isn’t being done to prevent them. This snowballs and just ends up costing a lot of money and headaches.

Plus, if you are only paying a company or tech to come in and fix a problem, you probably aren’t also asking them to make sure your IT infrastructure is optimized, secure, and properly vetted. More than likely, a technician that only handles hourly computer repair services doesn’t have the skill set to do this kind of work effectively—otherwise they’d be offering a more comprehensive service as opposed to just break/fix.

At the end of the day, this isn’t the best choice for most organizations. It works in a pinch, and it’s perfectly acceptable for home users or self-employed individuals, but once you’ve hit the 5-10 employee milestone, an hourly computer repair service is not worth it.

New England Managed IT Services Companies

Managed IT services is the answer to the shortcomings of the traditional break/fix computer repair companies. 

For a quick history lesson, managed IT services evolved out of the older break/fix computer repair model. IT companies quickly realized that if they simply offered a certain degree of maintenance and general IT monitoring, it would greatly reduce the number of issues and the amount of downtime a business would face. In most cases, the cost of IT maintenance for businesses was less than how much they would need to spend paying to fix issues. 

You can look at it like hiring an internal IT department. If you had in-house staff to manage the support requests, solve issues, and constantly maintain your computers and servers, you would likely deal with fewer issues. The problem is the expense. Hiring and training technical staff is an ever-increasing problem, and even if a business has one or two really good technical people on staff, there will always be a limit to their skills and experience. Working with an established managed IT services company that serves dozens or hundreds of different types of clients and has a fully-staffed service desk, network operations center, security operations center, and other types of roles means your organization can take advantage of a much broader range of skills.

On top of that, managed IT is almost guaranteed to be cheaper for a business than hiring in-house staff.

There’s a big caveat though.

It sounds perfect on paper, but there are a lot of companies throughout Massachusetts and New England that haven’t actually adopted all of the managed IT philosophies and best practices.

Instead, they charge a monthly rate to run Windows updates and provide some support, but it tends to result in one of three different problems:

1. They don’t actually maintain the network properly, which results in compliance issues or repeat issues that fall outside the scope of the agreement and end up costing your company billable time.
2. They don’t maintain the network properly, which results in the same issues as above but they increase your agreement to cover the work that they should be preventing.
3. They simply do the bare minimum, keeping the network fairly stable. While this tends to be adequate on the surface, it only preserves the status quo and doesn’t serve to drive the business forward or improve efficiency. 

For a lot of businesses throughout Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, and the rest of New England, this has sort of become the normal way of operating. It’s generally accepted that unexpected problems will occasionally crop up and cost money, or that IT management prices need to rise without actually doing anything to proactively solve the reason why they are in fact rising.

This isn’t the case for every IT provider claiming to offer managed IT services, but it’s a good idea to ask the following questions when shopping around for a provider before you sign anything:

Questions to Ask Before Signing a Managed IT Agreement

• Is there a limit to the amount of technical support my users can get?
  • This needs to be clear and acceptable for your business; sometimes businesses offer unlimited or “unlimited within reason” help desk support, which tends to be the best value.
• What are a few common requests that tend to fall outside of this agreement?
  • This will give you a decent idea of potential times you might incur additional fees.
• Are my backups monitored daily?
  • Having a backup is only half the battle, it needs to be monitored and reviewed regularly.
• Are all endpoints being monitored 24/7?
  • If you are signing an agreement and this isn’t happening, you really aren’t getting “managed IT services.”
• If a workstation goes down, what is the expected resolution time?
  • Downtime is costing your organization money, so fast response times and having a couple spare workstations on the IT roadmap should be a part of the plan.
• How often does server maintenance happen?
  • This needs to be happening weekly or biweekly.
• Does this include managed threat detection, security awareness training, and regular network/endpoint audits?
  • IT and cybersecurity protection needs to go hand-in-hand. If these tasks aren’t being done, it leaves your organization wide open for attacks that can be extremely expensive and cause major downtime, and even lead to legal ramifications.
• Does this include quarterly business reviews, IT budgeting meetings, and an account manager who takes the time to understand my business?
  • This is the big differentiator between an IT company that just wants to charge you a monthly fee, versus truly outsourcing your IT to a trusted partner.

IT Consultant Firms in New England

Finally, the third type of IT company or, in some cases, IT professional, will call themselves an IT consultant.

An IT consultant’s role is to advise and plan IT systems, and strategize ways to solve business problems using modern technology. That might include automating processes, reducing the amount of effort required for staff to do daily tasks, and ensuring that infrastructure is planned out and budgeted properly to prevent failure.

Essentially, an IT consultant’s role is similar to that of an in-house CIO (Chief Information Officer). This tends to be a pretty expensive position for many organizations, and the CIO tends to have a team they can manage in order to handle implementation, support, and ongoing maintenance. This isn’t usually obtainable for smaller or even mid-sized organizations, and even if a business has the budget for the staff, it could cut into the necessary technology budget (infrastructure, software licenses, hardware, research and development, training, etc.).

That’s where the IT consultant comes in. The IT consultant is the thread that ties your general IT support, managed IT services, cybersecurity, and your business goals together. If you are working with a managed IT provider, you’ll want to make sure that they have consultants who act as your account manager, understand your business objectives, and work with you to establish the technology you need to meet your goals. 

That’s the big differentiator; without this key role, your business is just paying a monthly agreement for a vague set of monthly tasks to get checked off. It might maintain the status quo, but it doesn’t help your business improve.

As mentioned before, these improvements can help you save money, increase productivity, improve relationships with your customers, put you ahead of your competition, and a lot more. If your current IT provider isn’t trying to lock management down with a quarterly, 6-month, or yearly meeting to discuss your IT budget, key performance indicators, and how IT can better align with business objectives, then they are doing a disservice.

Even if your IT provider was the cheapest quote, the amount of money you might be leaving on the table by not having someone help align your IT with your business can be staggering.

Let’s Change the Way You Look at IT

If you’ve felt like IT was always a necessary evil or a cost of doing business, then it’s likely that you haven’t had the right kind of experience working with an IT provider. Good technology support doesn’t have to be a luxury item reserved for larger businesses, and it shouldn’t just be a money pit either. Proper implementation of IT should have a return on investment or help your business effectively meet its KPIs and goals. 

At Datalyst, we can help you get there. We offer pure managed IT services, but the real value is our extremely knowledgeable IT professionals who can work with you to develop an IT budget and strategy that drives your business forward.

Let’s show you a better way of doing things—we can start with a simple consultation, sitting down for a high-level discussion on what the future might look like for your organization. You can start today by giving us a call at (774) 213-9701.