According to expert forecasts, the global IT support & maintenance services market will grow from $73.1 billion in 2025 to $122.5 billion by 2035, with a CAGR of 5.3%, largely driven by the widespread adoption of cloud computing and digital technologies. As a mature company that delivers custom digital solutions to businesses of all sizes worldwide and provides technical support services, we'll share our insights on this topic below.
What Is IT Support and Maintenance?
IT support typically refers to a set of processes and services aimed at providing the smooth operation of digital products, including monitoring, incident handling, SLA, user communications, and so on.
Meanwhile, IT maintenance services imply engineering work that ensures the operability of such products, including their patches, updates, refactoring, optimization, and the removal of technical debt, among others.
This suggests that IT support is focused on responding to existing issues, while maintenance focuses on preventing potential ones and the gradual evolution of the products.
Types of IT Support and Maintenance Services
So, let's consider the existing types of IT support and maintenance services.
Preventive
These are regular, pre-planned measures aimed at reducing the likelihood of incidents. They typically include patch management, backup recovery testing, load testing, queue and log cleanup, certificate renewals, and cron job reviews.
Corrective
This type of service includes bug fixing and troubleshooting, specifically hot fixes, rollbacks, emergency patches, and more. Technical teams also typically assign each incident a mandatory root cause analysis and action plan to minimize the likelihood of its recurrence.
Adaptive
Adaptive support and maintenance involve making product refinements necessitated by external factors, such as partner API updates, regulatory changes, switching to a new cloud vendor, and so on.
Perfective
Here, we're primarily talking about improving product quality, which, in turn, translates into improved performance and UX. Teams providing this type of service typically work on optimizing slow queries, refactoring, caching, reworking legacy components, and more.
Predictive
With this type of service, the team defines a series of business metrics and latency percentiles that identify "healthy" system behavior, as well as a set of triggers (as practice shows, they are more effective than regular alerts) that enable timely detection of anomalies. This ensures a proactive response to potential incidents.
Why IT Support and Maintenance Are Important for Businesses
Let's look at the key factors that determine the importance of IT support and maintenance from a business perspective:
- Measurable profitability. Every minute of downtime costs the business something, whether it's reputation or money. For example, when assessing the TCO of incidents, we take into account revenue loss, SLA penalties, CAC increases due to reputation, etc.;
- Guaranteed security and compliance. Timely security patches and audits help avoid fines and breaches. In particular, to maximize the efficiency of these measures, we integrate a compliance checklist into pipelines;
- Technical debt control. The longer the software lifecycle, the higher the likelihood of technical debt accumulation. Therefore, it's important to budget for its support from the start to prevent it from becoming an unexpected expense;
- Cost predictability. If you choose a managed support model, you can transform unexpected emergency expenses into regular OPEX with clear and understandable KPIs;
- Achieving optimal innovation speed. A constantly evolving infrastructure creates optimal conditions for the rapid implementation of new features without increasing the risk of regression;
- Established reputation. Since software stability always determines the overall brand image, support teams usually closely monitor user traffic (as a rule, an increase in this metric often follows a series of minor bugs, and not just major lags).
If you would like to achieve all these benefits for your digital solution, you can contact us for IT maintenance and support services.
Key Advantages of Professional IT Maintenance and Support
IT maintenance and support can be considered a kind of guarantee for the proper functioning of a digital system. Moreover, with the right approach, it can become a fully-fledged tool for maintaining the viability of the business – thanks to its security, predictability, and rapid response in the event of incidents on the digital plane. So, let's analyze the benefits of professional IT maintenance and support services in terms of business value in more detail below.
Rapid response to incidents
Typically, the larger a company is, the faster its clients expect incident response. For example, to ensure compliance with the highest requirements, we build our support system using a multi-layered escalation model, with the first line covering up to 60% of typical requests within the first 15 minutes, the second line handling complex infrastructure issues, and the third line handling engineering analysis. This approach allows us to minimize mean time to recovery and mean time to acknowledge. Also, in some cases (for example, in high-load eCommerce, FinTech, and SaaS projects, where even a few minutes of downtime can cost tens of thousands of dollars), it makes sense to rely on pre-defined runbooks and automated triggers – this way, typical incidents can be handled without human intervention.
Increasing the company's competitiveness
Companies with well-established IT support processes outperform their competitors in terms of change implementation speed. Regular maintenance also minimizes technical debt, which positively impacts release speed and makes implementing new features less risky. In particular, thanks to a proactive approach including end-to-end monitoring and stress testing, we maintain uptime above 99.9% even for clients whose solutions are regularly subject to peak loads, which, in turn, directly impacts their market share and user satisfaction.
Optimized resource allocation
Many businesses actively developing in the digital environment still underestimate the need to optimize their resource utilization – this is precisely what IT support and maintenance specialists are responsible for. Specifically, we deploy a centralized monitoring system to prevent our clients from wasting money on spare capacity that doesn't deliver them value. We also conduct regular performance analysis and predictive maintenance to promptly redistribute the workload and reduce costs.
Proactive risk management
The main difference between professional IT support and maintenance and a reactive approach is the ability to proactively launch a system that predicts and prevents failures before they cause damage to the business, rather than waiting for an incident. In our experience, we typically combine anomaly detection, logical monitoring, and regular security audits. As a result, businesses gain a resilient system that is not susceptible to unexpected external factors, which can be critical for highly regulated fields such as finance, healthcare, government services, and others.
What Problems May Businesses Face, and How Regular IT Maintenance Can Prevent Costly System Failures
According to our internal analytics, businesses with regular IT maintenance processes experience 40% less downtime and incur 25% lower overall incident response costs. This benefit is primarily due to the elimination of chaotic technical measures and their replacement with a managed system where each incident provides insights for future improvements. So, let's check the typical problems businesses face and find out how regular IT maintenance overcomes them.
Unpredictable system failures
Even a short-term software freezing can result in losses, from uncompleted orders and lost customer service to more serious reputational risks associated with the unavailability of emergency services. Since server overloads and hardware failures are the most common causes, regular IT maintenance comes to the rescue. This involves monitoring the status of servers and other network equipment, allowing for early detection of increased loads and hardware failures, and resolving them before the problem is noticed by customers.
Legacy and incompatible systems
When software updates are delayed, businesses risk losing their productivity; moreover, older software versions often prove unnecessarily vulnerable to hacker attacks. Also, untimely updating often leads to incompatibility between new tools and the existing infrastructure – actually, this explains the need for IT support, as it ensures regular version control and scheduled updates without interfering with your employees' productivity.
Data loss
Regardless of the cause of data loss, whether it’s human error, hardware failure, or a hacker attack, it can require extra data recovery efforts and take weeks or more. To minimize such risks, it makes sense to employ IT maintenance experts, who will set up backup automation to ensure all your critical data is securely encrypted and can be restored without downtime or loss.
Cyberthreats and security vulnerabilities
Every year, companies of all sizes become targets of network attacks, and, based on their experience, we can confidently say that inadequate protection leads to data leaks, serious reputational risks, customer loss, and even fines for non-compliance with security policies. At the same time, regular technical support includes security updates, antivirus system configuration, access rights audits, and pentesting, which ultimately ensures the required level of protection and prompt incident response.
Reduced employees’ productivity
A lack of system control pushes even the most stable IT infrastructure to the brink of inefficiency, with more and more processes becoming manual. Meanwhile, regular IT maintenance helps optimize hardware and software performance, optimally reallocating resources and ensuring consistently fast data processing, which, ultimately, leads to increased team productivity.
Lack of cost transparency
Finally, in companies where the IT environment is developing without any clear rules (for example, when some software is purchased without centralized accounting, and there is a high risk of duplicate licenses), management may not have a complete picture of costs, which negatively impacts subsequent scaling. Regular IT maintenance also makes sense here, as it includes infrastructure audits and asset accounting, and, therefore, can positively impact cost optimization in the long term.
How to Choose the Right IT Maintenance and Support Services Provider
Hiring an IT support and maintenance partner is a crucial decision, as a mistake in choosing one can be far more costly than the improper implementation of any single project. Moreover, unlike small projects where technical specialists are hired for a short period of time, an IT maintenance provider takes responsibility for the continuity of all your processes. Therefore, it's crucial to evaluate both the price, SLA, and the depth of their expertise in your industry.
Experience
Experience is an important factor to evaluate not only by the number of years in the market, but also by the portfolio of projects related to your niche and the technologies you're seeking. Furthermore, it's important to understand how well a potential vendor can adapt the best practices to the scale of your company. That's why it's crucial to ensure that this contractor can provide similar case studies with specific business results.
Reputation
A company's reputation can also serve as an indicator of a potential contractor's reliability and service quality. In particular, a reputable provider typically has long-term contracts, transparent SLAs, and a proven track record of fulfilling obligations with real clients. Reputation can also be gauged by team stability: if the company has low turnover, this indirectly indicates that internal processes are well-established, and you won't have to explain the same things to a new specialist every couple of months.
Customer reviews
Client reviews, which can be checked on independent rating platforms, are one of the most reliable sources of information (primarily Clutch and GoodFirms). However, it's worth paying attention not so much to the number of stars as to the case descriptions, specifically the problems solved, how involved the team was, and how the specific client rates the response time and communication.
FAQ
How does IT support improve cybersecurity for businesses?
Ongoing IT support involves much more than post-flight troubleshooting – it also involves creating a comprehensive threat prevention system. For example, we build such protection systems using the Defense-in-Depth principle, including regular updates/patches, end-to-end monitoring of network activity, and timely access rights audits. We also implement predictive analytics and SIEM tools, which allow us to detect security issues before hackers can exploit them.
Why is IT support crucial for businesses?
This can be explained by the fact that digital infrastructure today serves as the foundation for the vast majority of businesses' daily work processes. For example, if CRM or website lags, a company can lose the trust of thousands of customers in a matter of hours. At the same time, with a smart approach, IT support can ensure the system’s stability and reduce the likelihood of its downtime, which ultimately creates a favorable environment for businesses to focus on their core operations.
What are the risks of neglecting IT maintenance?
Ignoring IT maintenance always leads to the accumulation of technical problems, including outdated software versions, redundant dependencies, and, of course, security vulnerabilities. This ultimately risks making the aftermath of a failure tens or even hundreds of times more expensive to fix than with regular maintenance.
Can IT support help with data backup and disaster recovery?
Yes. For example, at our company, IT support includes setting up and regularly testing backups, which allows us to guarantee the safety of information even in the event of a complete hardware failure or ransomware attack.
What is the cost of IT support and maintenance?
The overall cost of IT support and maintenance services depends on the infrastructure scale, SLA, tickets, and required response time. If you would like to calculate the IT support and maintenance budget for your specific case, please contact us or give us a call.
