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Balancing Cost and Operational Continuity in Hybrid Remote and On-Site IT Support for Multi-Branch SMEs

Kelechi Chantel Egwuatu Anyanwu

Abstract

Multi-branch small and medium-sized enterprises must keep information technology (IT) running at every location while controlling cost, yet the two goals conflict. Remote support is economical and scalable but cannot resolve every fault or survive a local connectivity failure, whereas on-site support assures continuity but is expensive to replicate across sites and is frequently underused. The rapid shift to distributed operation in 2020 made this trade-off pressing and durable. This paper develops a conceptual framework, Balanced Hybrid IT Support, for combining remote and on-site delivery in proportion to how much continuity each branch requires. Synthesizing the literatures of IT service management, IT sourcing economics, and organizational resilience, the paper first characterizes the cost-continuity tension and the drivers that act on each side of it in a distributed setting, then specifies four interacting components: branch criticality profiling, remote-first service stratification, on-site assurance allocation, and an integrating governance and continuity layer. A decision logic maps branch criticality and incident type to the appropriate support channel, and a worked illustrative scenario shows how a hypothetical multi- branch firm would apply the framework end to end. The framework gives resource-constrained SMEs a transparent and defensible basis for directing finite support resources where they protect the most value, and it identifies boundary conditions and directions for empirical testing.

Keywords

IT support; hybrid support model; operational continuity; small and medium-sized enterprises; multi-branch operations; IT service management; cost optimization; business continuity

References

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