Tip of the Week: Businesses Fuel Growth with Technology

An IT provider can do a lot for your business, but it can exceed your organization’s expectations in more ways than one. A growing business, however, often runs into issues that need to be addressed regarding its technology. We’ll outline some of the major benefits that technology management from an IT provider can offer for a growing business.

Keeping Data Secure
Software updates need to happen periodically if you want to ensure your organization’s technology isn’t susceptible to security threats and operational problems. Studies have shown that failing to patch software or apply updates causes 44 percent of data breaches. You need to consider what could have been prevented for many of these businesses if they had just done the proactive maintenance needed to ensure these events never happened in the first place.

Of course, other threats can use your employees as a gateway to your infrastructure, and an unaware or untrained employee is basically the key. If your users fall victim to phishing attacks, they can be used against your business. These kinds of attacks have been increasing in scope and severity, so cybersecurity training has never been more important than it is today.

With security being such a pain point for businesses of all kinds, one of the primary responsibilities of managed IT is to make sure that a network is safe from threats. By proactively implementing security solutions and training employees on how to stay safe while working, you can ensure that the majority of threats your business faces will be stopped in their tracks.

Providing Trusted Outsourced Assistance
You might have an internal IT department of some sort already, but there’s a chance that they are already being pushed a little too hard to get all of their work done. Since they are responsible for both the management of your internal systems and implementing new solutions, there might be lost opportunities here and there caused by urgent issues that crop up from time-to-time. Small businesses that have limited IT resources thus have problems with innovation or preventative maintenance, putting them in a bind.

This is one of the reasons why many organizations turn to external resources, like outsourced IT providers, who can help make up for the operational deficit. Basically, you want to implement this in a way that provides the most value for your business. Depending on where most of your problems are coming from, you can have an outsourced provider offer support to employees, or focus on implementing new solutions to improve operations.

Protecting Your Business
While threats could assault your organization on the security side of things, there is another more sinister (and far less predictable) aspect to protecting your business that needs to be considered. You can never know when weather effects or natural disasters could strike, and you could be knocked out of commission for a while and suffer significant downtime. That being said, it’s likely that you’ll be going against the grain here, as issues that you can’t control will get in the way of your business recovering quickly.

A comprehensive data backup and disaster recovery solution is what your business will need to get back in action as soon as possible following a data loss incident. SCW can equip you with solutions to prolong your business and promote growth in the process. To learn more, reach out to us at (509) 534-1530.