For many businesses, despite the incredible benefits that technology can offer, it is often a source of significant stress. This is especially true for the small business owner, who often has much more restrictive parameters to work with, such as a limited budget, workforce, and even the workspace or office. How can businesses like yours stay competitive against companies that have so many more resources available to them? One answer, in terms of technology management, is managed services.
With so much tragedy, confusion, and conflict happening over the past year, businesses of all sizes have turned to technology as a required means of remaining open. As a result, the perspective that many of these organizations have of their IT has changed significantly. Listed below are some of the revelations that businesses have had, and how they’ll impact operations from this point on.
Your business needs its technology to fuel its day-to-day operations; that means they need to be maintained. Companies that don’t have an IT department will often look to utilize different strategies to ensure their IT is up and running. However, without the proper expertise, keeping this technology maintained can be a significant problem.
Technology has made its way into nearly every business, especially this year with the Covid pandemic. There really is no choice, but with the commitment to technology there comes risk. If technology fails, your business takes a step back. Below we discuss how managed IT services work to manage your risk and keep your IT running effectively.
While COVID-19 has mostly dominated the public awareness and created massive interruptions to businesses of all sizes, small businesses have clearly been impacted the most, essential and non-essential businesses alike. Naturally, this doesn’t mean that large enterprises and corporations aren’t also impacted. The difference is that these enterprises and corporations are sometimes better equipped to do something about it… which many have.
When was the last time your routers were updated? Not sure? How about your servers? What about other pieces of technology in your office?
Maintaining a business’ IT requires more than just running a virus scan every once and a while, or updating a critical program on each workstation. It requires an in-depth comprehension of each component and its history, assisted by the use of specialized tools and extensive record-keeping.
Macro Systems is always trying to get our message out, sharing how our services can add value to just about any kind of business - including nonprofits and municipalities - seeing as just about every modern business relies on technology to some degree. We wanted to demonstrate below how that value can present itself through managed services.
It wasn't too long ago that we had to haul a computer into the shop to get it fixed if there were problems. However, with the pace that modern business is conducted, this approach just isn’t effective for businesses any longer. Today, with the support of a managed service provider, support is available much more efficiently and affordably than ever.
Other than their size and the resources at their fingertips, what makes a small to medium-sized business so different from a large, enterprise-sized one? If you really think about it, there isn’t all that much. This is why many SMBs have turned to managed services… to receive IT support comparable to what the large businesses receive.
Some aspects of running your business’ infrastructure require a lot of time… time that you just don’t have in the day. Implementing patches, monitoring network traffic, and updating software solutions are all the usual culprits. In light of this, we recommend that businesses utilize a solution that permits for management to occur remotely, as it can offer a great benefit for businesses with both limited workforces and budgets.
Outsourcing your IT management or project management is routine for modern businesses, but it wasn’t always. For the first couple of decades of IT for business, outsourcing was the only way you were going to get a piece of technology up and working again without massive capital investment. Below we'll take a look at the break/fix method to IT management and how it is far more expensive than you may be aware of.
No organization can be successful if it’s constantly suffering from data breaches. Thus, you should take measures to reduce the problems caused by these threats before they present themselves. Listed below are four of the biggest problems your company could encounter in the field of network security.
It's likely that you’ve had to deal with the following scenario: You're efficiently working when you try to open an application only to be rebuked by an error message on the screen that tells you that there is some type of critical error. You close that out hoping that it was a one-time exception, but it appears up again. You think to yourself, “Why does this always happen?”
Tech-support scammers are typically just people who dial random numbers, try to convince the person on the other end that their computer has problems and they can fix them if the user allows them to remote into the device. They utilize tactics that are as generic and vague as possible to avoid having to mention any specifics; because some people find that their system’s performance is sluggish, they will give these people access, which usually ends in disaster.
How many Vendors do you have to deal with? The answer to that is most likely, quite a few. Now consider how much time is spent managing each of them. Wouldn’t it be awesome if there was some way to limit this time to essentially nothing?
Organizations of all sizes utilize varying degrees of technology to upgrade productivity, efficiency, and security. The more an organization depends on its data, the more imperative it is for them to manage and maintain the systems in which this data is dependent. For businesses that have a lack of financial resources to support these systems, it is often left to unqualified employees, putting your organization at risk. What do you do when you need expertise that you lack and can’t afford to hire in-house staff?
How often does your technology experience trouble? If your business is constantly dealing with technical hiccups, your assets that are meant to be a boon to your organization, can quickly become a nuisance that holds you back. How can you take better care of your technology, and use it to usher in a new era of productivity?
IT is meant to help your business function more efficiently, not impede operations. This is the cornerstone of the way that most businesses need to think about technology maintenance. Unfortunately, there are some businesses that either don’t have dedicated IT support, or waste valuable time and resources working with break-fix providers who don’t have their organization’s best interests in mind. To keep your organization from falling victim to these practices, you should consider managed IT for your technology maintenance.
Your business relies on mission-critical hardware that keeps its infrastructure running, including servers, workstations, and networking components. However, these pieces of technology require maintenance in order to function properly, and replacement every so often to keep the risk of downtime and hardware failure to a minimum. Thankfully, modern managed IT services have yielded a solution to this issue that can make managing your hardware infrastructure as easy as possible: Hardware as a Service.
While many may consider an audit of any kind to be a pain in the neck or worse, they can actually be an effective way to ensure that businesses are following best practices and remaining compliant. After all, nobody wants to be the company that failed an audit. Despite this, many companies aren’t up to standard where their IT is concerned, and it has an impact.
