For businesses throughout the Louisville area and across the United States, IT chaos is real. A data breach can jeopardize sensitive information about your business—or worse, your customers. Updates performed irregularly or at inopportune times can leave systems vulnerable. And an understaffed or inflexible IT team that can’t keep pace with growth puts you at a decided disadvantage against competitors with more cutting-edge knowledge.
These aren't just worst-case scenarios, they're everyday concerns. They can hold back businesses that lack the in-house expertise and bandwidth to address internal information technology needs. Thankfully, Louisville is home to Mirazon, which has built a proven track record of over two decades, and brings order to chaos through managed IT services.
"We have experts on staff who have 20 or 30 years of experience in this environment," said CEO Karen Albers, who co-founded Mirazon in 2000. "When you hire a managed service provider, you bring on a whole deck of different subject matter experts and people with different levels of expertise. You don't really get that when you have an internal team. You may have one or two people who are experts in a certain thing, but a managed service provider gives you people who can identify problems and fix them, from security to networking to the cloud to everything else."
Even companies with their own IT departments call Mirazon to attack specific problems or find specific expertise. So, why should your business partner with a managed service provider (MSP)? Albers, who's helped Mirazon grow from a regional service provider into an internationally recognized IT consulting firm, provides five reasons why utilizing an MSP makes perfect sense.
1. Predictable budgeting
Successful companies are always budget conscious. And adding an MSP sounds expensive, right? Won't they charge you every time the system needs maintenance, each time there's a news story about a data breach, or whenever Bob in sales forgets his password? The answer is no, thanks to Mirazon's predictable budgeting model.
"If you're working with your own IT team, budgeting is very difficult," Albers said. "If you're partnering with a team that is just coming in and helping as needed, your price is going to go up and down all the time. So, to be able to say, 'This is what your price is going to be,' you have forecasting, and you have control. Small businesses need to know what their costs are and be able to maintain that."
2. Access to the correct expertise
In IT, expertise is everything. Mirazon has a nearly bottomless well of expertise at its disposal, thanks to its roster of consultants who work with other businesses. "Whatever specialty you need," Albers said, "they can come in and fix that problem for you. They have that set of tools to get you up and running again."
Mirazon also offers clients 24/7 support, recognizing that many IT emergencies occur outside of business hours. And the Mirazon engineers focus on building lasting relationships with clients—taking the time to understand their priorities, people, and budget.
"You don't want to have to wait an hour for the IT person to find the server closet, or where somebody sits," Albers said. "We know that customer inside and out. And we also know their business applications, which isn't something somebody walking in off the street will know. We know their applications, and we know how to help them fix them quickly."
3. Security and compliance
The average cost of a data breach in the U.S. in 2024 was $10.22 million, according to the publication SecurityWeek, and every business with an internet connection is at risk. "Small businesses used to think they had a tolerance for risk, and they didn't need security. That's not the case anymore," Albers said.
"People would say, 'Oh, well, my competitors don't care.' Well, it's not your competitors," she added. "It's the bad actor sitting somewhere else, usually in a different country, who comes in and says, 'For this many millions, I'll give you your data back.' You just don't want that."
An MSP like Mirazon uses a full suite of cybersecurity technology that is constantly monitoring systems and identifying vulnerabilities. And it also offers help with compliance, safeguarding Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) data, social security numbers, banking account information, or other forms of sensitive material.
4. Proactive maintenance
Updates and patches are the oil changes of the IT world—sure, they seem inconvenient but overlook them long enough and bad things start to happen. Mirazon aims to manage those tasks at a time when they're least disruptive to the client, understanding that routine, proactive maintenance is critical to ensuring that systems don't unexpectedly go down.
"We can schedule downtime and maintenance around your schedule, so you're not down at 2:00 in the afternoon when everybody comes back from lunch," Albers said. "Instead, you can be down at midnight or 2 a.m. when nobody else is using the system. We update the technology, and it's back up and ready to go when you're ready to work in the morning."
And if you choose to ignore the updates and patches?
"It's a gamble," Albers said. "It all depends—how lucky do you feel today?"
5. Scalability and strategic IT alignment
You want your business to grow—and for that to happen, IT must grow along with it. Nothing can hinder an ambitious company more than an in-house IT staff that's stuck in the start-up stage, whether due to a lack of personnel, limited expertise, or simply an inability to scale up when needed.
An MSP like Mirazon can grow with you, helping to align technology with business goals. The alternative is something Albers sees all the time—an in-house IT expert who simply lacks the skill set to grow along with the company, leading to the pricey and inconvenient move of replacing that person with someone else.
"With an MSP, if you start with a 20-person company and buy three more companies, that whole time your infrastructure is being set up so it's correct for the size business you have," Albers said. "The security and the systems are all set up for the size business you are at that time, so we can scale it to match your needs."
Budgeting, expertise, security, maintenance, and scalability—they're all integral to building an IT setup that helps your business prosper.
Want to learn more about how your business can partner with Mirazon and elevate your technology using their managed IT services? Give them a call at (502) 240-0404, by email at info@mirazon.com, or visit their website at Mirazon.com.
