No company should be without an IT support team to rely on. But if you can't afford to hire an in-house team, you can still get the support you need by hiring an outsourced team at a fraction of the cost. Here are a few important features to look for when hiring your outsourced IT support team:

A Help Desk Suite

Your IT support team should provide a help desk suite for you and your employees to take advantage of over time. In addition to both onsite and remote support options that allow you to share your screen for a quick fix, your IT team should offer:

• 24 Hour Workstation Monitoring

• Computer System Management

• Mobile Device Syncing

• IT Tracking

• Workstation Upgrades

You should never be left on your own to address an IT problem as long as your support team offers a loaded help desk suite to rely on.

A Maintenance Plan

Another feature your outsourced IT support team should provide and maintain is a thorough maintenance plan. The team should be able and willing to maintain your servers, your local and cloud storage, and even your networks. A variety of manufacturers should also be supported including:

• Cisco

• Dell

• HP

• Enterasys

• Oracle

Any maintenance plans that are put into place for your business should be customizable to meet your specific needs and expectations. Make sure your IT support team offers both national and international maintenance support.

A Multi-Layered Security System

Virtual threats are always changing, so it's important that your outsourced IT support team offers a multi-layered security system your business can tap in to. A thorough perimeter defense for your network, firewall management, regular network inspections, DNS filtering are just some of the services to expect from your IT team. You should also be able to count on anti-spam and malware protection for all the computers that are used within your business.

Data Preservation

It's also a good idea to hire an outsourced IT support team that has the resources and ability to effectively preserve your company's data at all times. Your team should not only protect your data as it gets stored, but they should also ensure that it's constantly backed up to multiple cloud and internal sources that if the original data becomes corrupted or gets hijacked, you'll have records of everything and can get back on track immediately.

As long as your outsourced IT support team offers these features, you can feel confident about how your company's network is handled for years to come.