IT decision-makers must balance cost and performance when budgeting for the environment. In some cases, this leads to cuts to the IT team that seem reasonable but may not deliver the expected cost savings. Businesses may save money up front but end up paying more because of the hidden costs of an understaffed IT team.
Even companies not constrained by budget may have an IT team that is not equipped to handle the environment effectively. They may have adopted new technology or migrated to the cloud to address business objectives. But without proper staffing, they may also face unnecessary visible and hidden costs.
Visible Costs of an Understaffed IT Team
Some issues companies encounter with an understaffed IT team are easy to see. These problems affect productivity, operational efficiency, and competitive posture. They stem directly from having too few or improperly skilled team members.
- Slow problem resolution: Too few team members often result in slow problem resolution, affecting internal and external operations. Users may have to wait to resolve minor issues, unnecessarily slowing productivity. The business can suffer from lower customer satisfaction when issues with public-facing applications are not resolved promptly.
- Project delays: An understaffed team may be unable to implement new tools and applications effectively. They may have to postpone upgrades and patches to address more pressing problems. These delays can hamper internal operations, as users must rely on inferior or insecure legacy tools. The inability to leverage a new analytics platform can force an organization to miss profitable opportunities. A business may lose its competitive edge because it can not run advanced industry solutions.
- Excessive team turnover: The members of an understaffed team may be overworked and burn out over time. The stress of keeping the environment running without the right personnel will eventually wear down the most dedicated employees and increase the risk of human error. Typically, the best will leave for another opportunity, making the staffing problem even more severe.
Hidden Costs of an Understaffed IT Team
While the visible costs of understaffing can be substantial, the hidden costs can be more damaging to the business. Because these costs are not always obvious, they can impact an organization unexpectedly and at the worst times. They are not as easy to quantify as issues like long ticket-resolution wait times or staff members continuously leaving the company. But they carry substantial costs you must consider when staffing an IT team.
Security exposure
Security exposure is potentially the most expensive cost of an understaffed team. Team members may not be able to keep up with all of the system, firmware, and application patching necessary to protect the infrastructure from evolving threats. Every time an update is skipped or delayed represents another small risk the company takes.
The team may miss seemingly minor security alerts that would have signaled when proactive measures were needed to address a vulnerability. For example, they may not have time to investigate repeated failed network access attempts by threat actors because they are putting out fires to keep business operations running. This inactivity will eventually be punished when an attacker gains access and steals data or delivers ransomware.
Decision-makers may justify these risks in the short term by focusing on the reduced costs of supporting a smaller IT team. These savings can be dwarfed by the financial and reputational damage from a data breach that timely patching could have prevented. In most cases, the security debt caused by an understaffed team will come due with serious consequences.
Slower business activity
In modern companies, the IT environment is the foundation for most business activity. Sales, marketing, and other departments typically use IT solutions for many daily tasks. Slow problem resolution from understaffed teams becomes more than simply an annoyance when a salesperson loses a sale because of laptop issues.
Similarly, delayed projects can substantially affect business health. A marketing team without a new automation tool may struggle to compete with rivals that understand the impact of an understaffed IT team. The costs of lost business can quickly exceed the savings of running a short-staffed team.
Shadow IT adoption
Employees unsatisfied with the IT team’s response time may be motivated to find alternate, often unapproved, solutions. They may use personal SaaS applications or store files in cloud accounts instead of company-approved tools. Shadow IT contributes to data sprawl and security blind spots that even a well-staffed team may not know about or be able to address.
Lack of strategic IT capabilities
An understaffed team will, by necessity, have to react to problems before focusing on strategic infrastructure or environment improvements, such as a more efficient backup or disaster recovery solution. Over time, the lack of long-term planning and implementation will degrade operational efficiency. The costs of inefficient operations may accrue slowly, but have a major impact on a company’s bottom line.
Knowledge loss
Organizations risk devastating knowledge loss when information is concentrated in a few key individuals. That great engineer who just quit may have had intimate knowledge of unique aspects of the IT environment that cannot be replaced. A larger team can cross-train so losing a single member will not cause extensive disruption.
Strengthen Your IT Team With Managed Services
Managed Services provide a cost-effective way to strengthen your IT team. VAST’s managed services can support both understaffed and under-skilled IT teams with experienced professionals. We can augment your IT team with on-site personnel to address staff shortages. Additional engineers can be exactly what you need to reduce team burnout and turnover.
Our portfolio of dedicated managed services can help your company implement data protection and disaster recovery solutions that are out of scope for the current team. Managed Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS) and Cloud Backup-as-a-Service (CBaaS) let you add valuable and crucial capabilities to your IT environment without additional in-house staffing. Our managed public cloud service provides deeply experienced teams that can optimize your cloud presence while your employees focus on core business activities.
Contact VAST today to learn how our managed services address the visible and hidden costs of an understaffed IT Team.
