We’re living in a technology-driven era where technology plays a vital role in our personal and professional lives. Without technology, it’s hard to be competitively productive. For many businesses, the challenge is that technology’s complexity creates barriers to leveraging its full potential. But, with the help of IT support, businesses can get the best from technology and tap into its power for realizing their vision for the future. In this piece, we discuss how IT support plays a role in driving business productivity.
The Role of IT Support in Business Productivity
Technology acts as a foundation for value-creation in many businesses. IT support underpins this foundation, ensuring that the business is able to operate efficiently day to day, whilst also platforming the business’s ability to reach for the stars! Effective IT support is essential to actualizing the potential that a business has.
By leveraging IT support, businesses can streamline their operations, optimize processes and boost their overall productivity. Here’s how:
Seamless Infrastructure Management
IT Infrastructure affects uptime, network speeds, security, and the opportunities for integrating technologies together. This means that the quality of IT infrastructure determines how fast, streamlined, secure and flexible a business’s operations can be.
Efficient IT support ensures that your business’ infrastructure, including servers, networks and devices all continue to run smoothly. IT support minimizes downtime and resolves technical issues promptly, allowing employees to focus on their core tasks and value-drivers, instead of losing time and energy to IT problems such as outages, slow networks, or malfunctioning software.
High quality IT support will also be able to give forward-looking, strategic assistance by helping you to plan and evolve your infrastructure to support your future growth plans in a way that aligns your people, processes and technology.
Software and Application Support
Software and applications are becoming ever-more crucial to the operations of businesses, IT support ensures that businesses can smoothly operate their software and applications. For example, IT support professionals can assist in installing, updating and troubleshooting these tools, as well as monitoring and optimizing their performance to drive productivity. This ensures that your employees can get the best from their software and can work efficiently and securely with consistency.
Data Security and Backup
Losing data can bury a business in problems if it is does not have access to up-to-date backups. The causes of data loss vary, including hardware malfunction, human error, and especially today, due to cyber threats including phishing and malware. Data security and backups are a somewhat overlooked essentials, given what’s at stake.
Shockingly, 60% of small businesses go out of business within 6-months of suffering a successful cyber-attack. It may seem like it won’t happen to your business, but evidence suggests that smaller businesses are often targeted due to slack, ineffective cyber security measures and poorly executed backup and recovery plans. This lack of resilience allows cybercriminals to extort payment from small business using the likes of ransomware attacks, a threat that can threaten the viability of businesses that fail to implement robust defensive measures.
IT support teams implement robust security measures, such as firewalls, antivirus software and data encryption to safeguard your data from cyber threats. IT support providers can set up regular data backups, ensuring that critical information is never lost and can be quickly restored if needed.
Advantages of Outsourcing IT Support
Now that we’ve looked at the role IT support can play in maintaining the security, reliability and efficiency of an IT network, let’s look at some of the benefits outsourcing can offer compared to operating an internal IT team.
Cost Savings
Creating and maintaining your own in-house IT department can be expensive and complex, and depending on the resourcing for it, may still leave some gaps in the IT support services that you need. By outsourcing IT support, businesses can reduce costs by outsourcing their IT support to a specialized and scalable provider that can wrap their support around the needs of the business.
With flexible pricing models, you can scale IT support and management services based on what your business needs, and an IT support provider can help you to identify opportunities to reduce costs without losing value. From day-to-day support to identifying opportunities for improvements, IT support can help businesses to save money.
Access to Expertise
IT support providers have teams of multidisciplinary professionals with expertise in a range of technologies and industry best practices. By partnering with an IT support provider, your business can enjoy a breadth and depth of expertise that could be hard to build internally.
The scope of this expertise is wide; an IT support provider can help you to implement technology projects, deploy a robust set of cybersecurity measures, optimize your physical IT infrastructure, and help you to leverage cloud technologies, amongst many other possibilities to drive value.
24/7 Support and Proactive Monitoring
IT issues can happen at any time, and they can be paralyzing without prompt and proactive support to address them. Outsourced IT providers usually offer round-the-clock helpdesk support to businesses, provided through a dedicated help desk. With this ever-ready support, it’s possible to resolve technical issues promptly, enabling your team to continue doing their best work with minimal disruption.
IT support providers also use technology that gives proactive and continuous monitoring of your IT infrastructure, which identifies and resolves potential issues, including cybersecurity threats for your business. In this way, this proactive support helps businesses tap into their productive potential, troubleshoot and resolve issues, and remain secure and compliant.
Choosing the Right IT Support Provider
So, how can your maximize these benefits with the right IT support provider? Not all providers are equal, offering different services, specialisms and packages. When choosing an IT support provider, consider these factors:
Experience and Expertise
You’ll want to ensure the provider can walk the walk, so take care to verify that providers have a solid track record in delivering IT support services. You could verify their certifications, years of business, client testimonials, and ask for statistics about their support services such as response times and client satisfaction ratings. Additionally, there are IT support providers that focus on serving particular markets, so it can often be a good idea to find one that serves businesses that are similar to yours.
Scalability and Flexibility
An IT support provider is a long-term technology partner that can scale their services to evolve with their client’s business. There are two key layers to assessing scalability and flexibility. One is contractual, involving examining the flexibility of service level agreements, pricing models, and contract terms; while the second layer is more strategic, which involves looking at the scope of services that are on offer and seeing how these align with your growth plans for the future.
With a scalable and flexible IT support partner, you can find a long-term partner that can tailor their support and price points in lockstep with your business.
Proactive Approach
IT support providers can take a more reactive or proactive approach, with the latter always being better, of course! Reactive providers will tend to be less genuinely concerned with your strategic needs and solving IT problems at their root-cause, nor will they be inclined to deliver IT support services beyond service level agreements.
A proactive IT support provider on the other hand, considers service level agreements to be a minimum benchmark and will be invested in delivering tailored and strategy-empowering support to your business. They will be more likely to form a close and genuine partnership with your business, which makes all the different in deriving maximum value from your IT. Choose a provider that invests their head and their heart into your business’s success.
Empower Your Austin Business with IT Support that Helps You Get Ahead!
New technologies are emerging at an ever-increasing rate, with an IT support provider, you can get the best from your technology and get ahead of the curve. A proactive IT support provider helps you maintain, leverage and secure your IT infrastructure in a way that empowers your business operations and growth. With the right provider, you can enhance value, lower costs, and drive more profitable value on your business journey.
Ready to harness the power of technology in your business? Talk to us!
SystemSeven IT are expert dedicated providers of outsourced IT services, based in Austin, Texas. We’re local experts with a global reach, bringing passionate and tailored support to businesses that are looking to leverage their technology to grow and streamline their services. If you’re looking for some expert guidance for the technological challenges you’re facing, get in touch with us today!