How IT Management Affects Business

We all know that businesses today rely on computer system to function, when then they fail or don’t work everything grinds to a halt. Small businesses even with just 5 employees can feel the sting of a 1 day computer outage in the form of lost profits, productivity & goodwill.

 

 

Trustworthy IT guidance can be hard to find. As Phoenix area IT consultants we encounter a few typical scenarios, do these sound familiar?

• My I.T. person quit & has all our passwords
• We have to pay repeatedly to fix same issues
• Want to move to the cloud, but need help weighing pros / cons
• Affordable way to add security & maintenance

Without business programs, financial software, & E-mail an enterprise cannot run for long. With so much riding on the success of IT, it’s surprising that most small businesses do not allocate sufficient budget. Proper IT management doesn’t have to be expensive, in fact managed services can save money while increasing service levels.

Consider this brief example of a real local customer:

A Phoenix area manufacturing company called recently wanting to spend $6500 on a new server to fix speed issues after hiring 3 IT consultants. Once we looked into it the problem was obvious, all 3 firms wanted a piece of the server profit. No new hardware was needed, just a few hours of reconfiguration. This also freed up $1500/mo in part time IT. Now staff is more product, the budget is trimmer & service levels are better than ever.

Ask your IT provider or internal IT the following questions to help gage the current status of your systems:

• How is our data being backed up & how often?
• Do we have a list of current passwords for server / router?
• What is our maintenance routine & how often does it run?
• Which Anti-virus do we have on our server and desktops?
• Do we still have Server 2003 or Windows XP? (If so plan to replace)

These are tough questions for IT staff, but important to the operation & security of the business no matter the size. A basic IT strategy should at least include answers to the questions above. Not sure where to start? For a free IT evaluation contact Visionary IT (www.visionaryaz.com)