Not many things change as quickly as technology. The list of IT challenges to businesses shifts and changes constantly as technology evolves, making IT system management no easy task.
Protec’s long-term experience with medium sized businesses has helped us to identify the most common and time-consuming challenges affecting these businesses. Clearly, there are many IT challenges faced by medium sized businesses, but let’s start by looking at our top 5 and how to overcome them:
1. Issues with current IT provider
Perhaps the most important aspect of IT is maintaining a good relationship with a trusted managed IT service provider. Many IT challenges can be prevented by having a reliable and skilled IT support team. Having a reputable and experienced managed IT services provider means that your business will be protected from the most common problems. Despite this, many businesses stay with their current provider even when they’re unhappy with their service, as they believe that migrating to a new service provider will be difficult, costly, and time-consuming.
Here at Protec, we’ve been providing a personal, dedicated service for our clients, whatever their size and sector of business, for over 15 years. We also manage the move for new clients, making the transition easy and ensuring minimal disruption to their business.
2. Monitoring levels of productivity
Using IT systems to monitor employee productivity allows business owners to identify any issues, highlight areas needing improvement, and make changes to increase efficiency and ensure long-term growth. It has been found that monitoring employees can actually have an automatic effect on their productivity simply because they know that they’re being monitored. When employees are aware that management is keeping track of what they do with their time, they tend to be more focused and less distracted, which improves the overall productivity of the business. Of course, monitoring employees constantly is a time-consuming task that is not possible for many business owners. Fortunately, by using our managed IT services, you’ll feel as though you have your very own outsourced IT Director – we’ll keep track of everything so you don’t have to, allowing you to focus on your core business tasks.
3. Managing an IT help desk
Most modern businesses rely heavily on technology, so they need support processes that can rapidly fix IT problems and handle any technical issues or challenges that may occur. Your IT help desk may be the first point of contact with your business for customers or staff, so providing a capable help desk experience is vital. Some businesses choose to manage IT support services internally, but it’s now increasingly common for businesses to outsource this work. Having an outsourced IT help desk means that skilled professionals will be on hand to ensure that any IT problems are resolved efficiently. This will improve the customer experience, help to create the all-important first impression, and allow your business to focus on its core aims.
4. Changing business requirements
It’s important that your IT systems have the right amount of flexibility and scalability to ensure that they can meet changing business requirements. An IT system that is size-appropriate now may not be in the future, especially if your business has a period of fast growth. For this reason, you need to choose the right system that has the capacity you need today but can also meet any future expansion needs. At the same time, you need to ensure that you’re not paying for more capacity than you actually need.
5. Data backup issues
In our digital age, many businesses rely heavily on IT infrastructure to carry out their daily tasks. Continuous IT functionality is therefore vital for most businesses, but your IT systems are almost certain to malfunction at some point – whether this is due to nature, human interference, or cyber activity. Replacing lost information will have a negative impact on any sized business, both in terms of lost productivity and revenue. It therefore goes without saying that all modern businesses should have a disaster recovery plan in place, to ensure the swift recovery of valuable data in the event of data loss or disaster. At Protec we help our clients, both new and existing, to understand the impact that an IT disaster can have on their business and discuss the importance of disaster recovery, helping them to find the very best solution.
SO, how can you overcome these challenges today?
Overcoming these and other IT challenges to support long-term success of your business is not difficult to achieve with support from IT professionals. Here at Protec, we can help you overcome any IT challenges that your business may face, now or in the future. To discuss how your business could benefit from managed IT services partnership, contact the experts at Protec today.