How the Right IT Company Saves You Money

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

  • The former I.T. person quit & has all our passwords
  • We pay repeatedly to fix the 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 customer:

A Phoenix area manufacturing company called recently ready to spend $7,000 on a new server to fix issues after hiring 3 IT consultants. After completion of a free evaluation, the problem was obvious, no new hardware was needed, just a few hours of reconfiguration. Now staff is more productive, the budget is trimmer & service levels are better than ever.

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

  • How is our data being backed up & how often?
  • Explain your password management & change pulicy
  • Provide a monthly or quarterly IT performance report
  • Are drivers, firmware and other non-Windows updates being performed?
  • Do we still have Server 2008 or Windows 7? (If so plan to replace)
  • What is our Disaster Recovery plan in the event of an outage?

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 us today.