Do you know what your IT initiatives are or what your IT support is working on? If you know the answer, great! You are among the few business owners who do. If you are not, here are six talking points to discuss with your IT support and how they can help your business.
Evaluating cloud services.
As the industry changes, cloud services are becoming more available to the masses at a much lower cost than ever been available before. The benefit of cloud services compared to on-premises services is that they are scalable to the growth and shrinkage of your business. You purchase what you need now, not what you may need in the future. The cloud service provider, as opposed to internal, handles backups and business continuity. This helps reduce the cost to you, the business owner, and allows you to more effectively project IT costs on an annual basis.
Proactive monitory of workstations and servers.
Technical downtime for employees costs the company money and nearly any disaster can be avoided with proactive monitoring. With nearly real-time health analysis of devices, problems are addressed before they become catastrophes. Real-time email or SMS notifications for these issues provide notification to you before disaster occurs, resulting in less downtime for your employees and allows you to continue to run your business effectively.
Email backup and archiving.
In today’s business world, email is the number one mode of communication for the majority of companies. Therefore, it is critical for a business to maintain as close to 100 percent uptime with their email services. If an email catastrophe occurs, it is imperative to have these emails backed up and archived. The majority of archive services offer a centralized, tamper-proof archive of all company emails from both current and prior employees. These services offer a searchable database of company emails to find information easily across all sources using advanced search criteria. This allows employees to better research on historical issues with clients, employees, and vendors.
A clear vision of your business and its direction.
Your IT support should be offering technology initiatives that align with where your business is going, and not leading you towards technology trends that do not serve your needs. If the decision makers in the business are not comfortable with being on the bleeding edge of technology, proper solutions should be proposed and evaluated based on this comfort level. The IT support company should also be aware of industry trends in the technology space, including devices, services, and line of business software. These services should be researched and evaluated based on company needs.
Planned and tested disaster recovery systems a/k/a, a contingency plan.
Because your company’s data is critical to your business operations, physical disaster should be taken into consideration with your systems. If a pipe bursts in your office overnight and floods your computer room, do you have a set of data offsite that can restore business operations? Besides physical disasters, there are human created disasters as well. If an angry employee deletes data from your systems, is your data backed up regularly enough so that there is minimal to no loss in recovery? Adding to that, is there a way to detect whether malicious activity has occurred when an employee leaves the company?
With disaster preparation plans in place, there is still a chance that you can experience catastrophic data loss without properly testing and verifying that backups are successfully taking place. Ensure data recovery is possible regardless of whether monitoring systems are reporting successful backups.
Documentation of systems, technical processes, and service credentials.
If your IT support leaves your company tomorrow, is there a way for you to pick up the pieces? We don’t often know that we need certain things until it is unavailable. Are there services your company uses that only a single person or company knows how to use or gain access to? If this is the case, it is imperative that you require this information to be stored in a central location where you have access to the information.
Although you may not intend to use the information on a day-to-day basis, the information is necessary for those times when support is unavailable. Having the information available can potentially save employees’ time and the company money in a time of need. By documenting technical processes, the company can save on training of new employees because less time of a physical person is required during the training process. A new employee has documents to be able to do his or her job with minimal interaction.
In summary, these are six things you should be talking to your IT support about. It is vital to ensure their implementation or consideration at your company. With these simple things, you can improve the state of your technology systems with little to no extra cost to you, and in many cases, cost savings.