This time last year, there were 20 hopeful cities hoping to get a piece of the Amazon HQ2 expansion. Atlanta, Austin, Boston, Chicago, Columbus, Dallas, Denver, Indianapolis, LA, Miami, Montgomery County, MD, Nashville, Newark, Ney York, Northern Virginia, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Raleigh, Toronto and Washington.

Now that two states have been chosen, Northern Virginia and New York, it’s time to take stock on what this means for the local areas where Amazon will be expanding.

First of all, there is the traffic – neither Virginia or New York are areas where people say, “Boy, I had such an easy commute this morning.” :-)

We can expect things to get far worse in both areas.

Even worse --  the biggest challenge for competitors for tech talent is the fact that the winning HQ2 bidders are giving Amazon a ton of money. Up to $3 billion in New York, meaning they can afford to give each of their 25,000 new workers at least $150,000 per year. Then there is Amazon’s stock price. Today they became the most valuable U.S. company, meaning stock options become another powerful hiring incentive.

There is actually a silver lining to this impending cloud descending upon the east coast from Seattle.

The MSP.

Managed service providers have been providing quality solutions to companies of all sizes for many decades. These IT services companies can take care of the needs of your company – including cybersecurity.

In addition, companies gain from being able to access an entire team of workers at a reasonable price.

Entire departments can be replaced in-fact by a solid MSP.

No more concerns and costs relating to benefits, raises, training, etc.

It isn’t always about the cost – MSPs virtually always are better at solving problems than an in-house team. The reason is simple, MSPs are typically providing service to hundreds or thousands of customers. This aggregate knowledge is tremendously useful as it allows the MSP to have a better idea of what to do in crunch situations.

At Apex Technology Services we have seen companies running with in-house IT and everything was going fine until ransomware or other similar challenge hit. A lack of experience caused mistakes to be made because IT was experiencing new issues and had to act fast. This resulted in equipment which needed rebuilding, longer downtime and far greater total cost.

In other cases, in-house IT is awesome – but they don’t have the bandwidth to deal with help-desk calls and an MSP is brought in to help.

MSPs are also called in to audit systems to ensure they are running optimally. An MSP or managed service security provider (MSSP) can handle penetration testing and cybersecurity training for the company. Both of these should be performed frequently throughout the year to minimize cyber-risk.

The bottom line is – if you have an office where accessing and retaining tech talent was tough, 2019 will be even worse.

As always, fortune favors the prepared. Companies like Apex Technology Services are here to help – whatever your questions may be. Give us a call.