Management

Save Time and Money on Managing Your Microsoft Infrastructure

Small cities and counties that can’t afford Microsoft Unified have affordable alternatives.

Dan Danciger is a Solutions Executive at CDW.

Budget and workforce are invaluable resources at the state and local levels of government, and both are hard to come by. This is especially true for small and rural communities. Increasingly complicated IT environments and aging workforces only make things harder.

When it comes to tech support for Microsoft IT environments, Microsoft Unified is a tremendous service for larger government entities such as state agencies or departments under the umbrella of major metropolitan areas.

But it’s typically out of budget for small and rural communities. When something breaks, these jurisdictions may find themselves waiting on hold to get support, and when they finally do get it, it won’t be at the personalized level they require. Not to mention, that support is charged on an hourly basis. The longer it takes to acquire the necessary support, the more it ends up costing.

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Affordable, Personalized Support for Small and Rural IT

Alternatives that are more tailored to smaller jurisdictions exist, and CDW Technology Support is one of them.

At a high level, CTS Microsoft is an IT-to-IT support service for Microsoft software and systems that provides:

A single point of contact
Access to Microsoft-certified engineers
Competitive pricing
Incident priority
24/7/365 support

CTS also comes with flexible engineering hours. When the time comes for a deployment, Microsoft-certified engineers can serve as a contact to offer strategic and tactical guidance. This is helpful for agencies that don’t require a deployment partner but have questions that can be resolved via a phone call with a Microsoft-certified engineer.

Support applies to all Microsoft software and systems, including, but not limited to, Microsoft Server OS, Azure, SQL Server, Microsoft 365, Dynamics, Teams, Intune, SharePoint, Copilot, Server (on-premises) and Exchange Server (on-premises).

Windows 11 migration support is another key CTS benefit. The October 2025 deadline to move away from Windows 10 is quickly approaching. CTS can offer support for towns and counties as they work through some of the hurdles associated with the migration.

DISCOVER: Should state and local agencies invest in AI PCs?

A Free, Comprehensive Cloud Dashboard To Help Manage Costs

The other core benefit of CTS is access to a tool called CDW Inscape at no additional cost. Inscape is a cloud and Software as a Service management platform that works with Microsoft cloud products as well as Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Platform.

I cannot overstate how much of a value-add Inscape is for smaller organizations. Cloud is not a magical cost-saving tool. It certainly offers flexibility and can lower costs in the long run, but that doesn’t happen by default. It requires cost management and thoughtful cloud optimization.

With Inscape, IT managers have all of the cloud business intelligence they need. They can quickly access cloud spending, easily monitor costs, identify trends, manage budgets, report on subscriptions and even create alerts pertaining to spending. The idea is to provide a complete view of their different cloud assets to ease financial management of multicloud environments.

LEARN MORE: Inscape can help agencies manage their cloud spending more effectively.

The Bottom Line for Rural Areas

Small cities, towns and counties — especially in rural areas — are accustomed to doing more with less. It’s all much easier said than done, though.

If there is just one thing you take away from this article, it should be that tech support for your Microsoft environments doesn’t have to be an all-or-nothing scenario. If you can’t afford Microsoft Unified support, there are alternatives out there that can still provide everything you need. In the case of CTS, the baseline layer of support is far less expensive than Microsoft’s support, and significantly more cost-effective than having to recruit and hire new staff from a thin pool of applicants.

Cost-effective IT is all about working with what you have, and CTS and Inscape help small towns and counties do exactly that.

This article is part of StateTech’s CITizen blog series.