Tech Minutes

Does your business have trouble with managing and maintaining your technology? If so, you’re not alone. Many small businesses struggle with even the most basic elements of IT maintenance. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could just take this responsibility and shift it off of your employees? The best way to approach technology maintenance is to implement managed IT services.

You might have only recently heard about outsourced IT services, but you might be surprised to hear that they have been around for far longer than you previously thought. Even before managed IT, however, business owners and individuals alike were using the outsourced services of others to simplify operations and day-to-day tasks related to their technology management.

Technology maintenance and management is one of the major pain points of all businesses, but it comes more easily to large organizations that have large budgets. Unfortunately, small organizations are often left out, placing such an important aspect of managing their business on the back burner. How, then, can you take advantage of proactive IT maintenance without breaking your budget?

Fundamentally, business is simple: if you take in more revenue than you have expenses, your company is a success. There are just so many elements to manage to ensure that revenues outpace expenses that it becomes difficult to ascertain what you can do to cut costs and see a higher degree of profitability for your efforts.

As more and more businesses rely on technology solutions to accomplish their everyday tasks, there is a natural expectation for there to be a bit of a learning curve as these advanced solutions are prioritized and accounted for. However, a few industry research firms have compiled their expectations for how this learning curve tendency will influence the needs and challenges businesses will face during the rest of the year.

In the natural course of doing business, an owner/operator will have to face many difficult situations, but none of these situations are as difficult as asking them to determine whether or not to close the doors of the business for good. Many problems could cause a business to fail, but it has to hurt the failing owner a little more when the solution for the problem was not only within his/her reach, it was affordable.

A small business is just as susceptible to the many problems that face large enterprises, and the dangers only multiply with the more technology you implement in the office. The larger your network gets, the more difficult data distribution and storage becomes. The more employees you work with, the more devices that will appear in the office. The more data you work with, the more likely you are to get hacked. These are all very real risks. What are you doing to protect your company from these threats?

We’d like to present one surefire way to dodge the majority of problems associated with business technology management: outsourced IT services from Directive. We can use our proactive approach to take care of your technology so that you can focus on running your business. While we offer many different types of services, here is a brief rundown of some of our popular ones.

Data Backup and Disaster RecoveryHave you taken the time to think about what your business would do if it suddenly lost all of its data? If not, do so now. It could be much more than just a couple of months’ worth of leads put at risk. An untimely hardware failure could have lasting effects on the way that your business functions. You’ll need to replace the hardware, which could take several days, or even weeks. During this time, your business isn’t working as intended, which can severely damage your productivity. Instead of suffering from this unfortunate occurrence, you can implement a BDR to take multiple copies of your data and keep them safe for recovery at a later date. BDR is designed to eliminate downtime and take a proactive stance against data loss due to natural disasters, hacking attacks, user error, and more.

Remote Monitoring and MaintenanceMost problems with your technology can be resolved remotely, without the need for an expensive on-site visit. Managed IT services capitalize on this convenience by allowing you to get the help that you need, when you need it. This cuts out waiting for the technician to arrive on-site and keeps downtime caused by the issue to a minimum, allowing you to get the problem fixed right away and get right back to work. Furthermore, we can apply any necessary patches and security updates remotely so that you will always be protected from existing and developing threats.

Network SecurityHacking attacks and security threats will always be one of the most dangerous parts of running a business. Some of the scariest threats currently on the Internet include ransomware and botnets that enslave Internet of Things devices. Only a cybersecurity professional knows how to identify and prevent infections from known threats. We can equip your business with a comprehensive Unified Threat Management solution to limit infections on your network in the first place. The UTM includes an enterprise-level firewall, antivirus, spam blocker, and content filter.

You’re in the middle of a project when your computer starts acting up. You smack it around a little bit to see if that has any effect, but it only makes the problem worse. Suddenly, there’s a blue screen and you have no clue what to do. What happened to your data? What will happen to your project? What will you do about the workstation replacement? Read on to find out.

The aforementioned scenario is one that is common in the realm of break-fix IT. Someone’s computer or other piece of technology breaks down and they don’t know how to fix it themselves. They wind up investing in expensive IT support, but more than this, they waste valuable time and resources resolving a problem that could have been prevented. This has led innovators in the technology maintenance sector to create what’s called managed IT services, which are designed to take a proactive stand against IT troubles, rather than resolve them as they occur.

It’s More Cost-EffectiveThe more time you spend spinning your wheels on an IT problem, the more time you wind up wasting. The more time you waste, the less time you can spend on profit-making initiatives. Previously, your organization was almost certainly including IT in its budget as a capital expense, but by implementing more flexible monthly payments, you can effectively turn your IT budget into an operational expense. The end result is more flexibility in your budget as a whole.

You Have More TimeWhat would you do if you didn’t have to waste time managing or maintaining your business’s technology solutions? Perhaps you would invest time into building your brand, or maybe you would rather focus on improving internal operations and employee morale. Maybe you’d like to give out the raises that your team deserves, or invest in future innovation. Either way, you’ll have more time and resources to devote to what really matters: running your business.

Your Technology Gets the Help It NeedsToo often businesses rely on their own employees to ensure that technology gets updated. This generally happens if an organization doesn’t have the resources to hire an internal IT department to take care of their technology. In other words, when you have people who have no clue what they’re doing managing and maintaining technology, chances are that mistakes will be made and time will be wasted. By having professional technicians working with your technology, you can know with confidence that your systems are being maintained by trained professionals.

Managed IT services are so popular with small businesses that they’re becoming a commodity. If you’re not taking advantage of managed IT, what’s your excuse? Here we address three common excuses put forth by companies that avoid managed IT.

Business owners expect a lot out of their IT network, and rightfully so. However, technology isn’t perfect and can sometimes get in the way of these expectations. To overcome these technology shortcomings, IT administrators and business owners can benefit by outsourcing these expectations, especially when it comes to these three crucial aspects of IT.

Technology’s incredible growth has brought about a need for technicians who are skilled enough to handle everyday maintenance. As time passes, technology grows more complex, and as such it requires more comprehensive maintenance. Eventually, innovators in the IT industry discovered that their services could be improved by preventing technology problems from happening in the first place. Enter: managed IT services.

Every organization has mission-critical systems that they rely on in order to function, and the IT technician is responsible for keeping them running. Modern technology and best practices have given rise to a new way of managing business technology, one that knocks the traditional break-fix IT out of the water.