Can your small business survive during the Covid crisis?
The management stresses that are pressed upon small business owners during this time of crisis are many fold. How do you keep your business afloat during the crisis that diminishes your ability to react, with your staff either working from home, or limited in their ability to interact with each other and customers.
Working from Home has expanded dramatically during the Covid crisis.
Companies need to rethink their operating model based on how their staff work best, including operations and IT. I know this is old news, but the push to digital tech is accelerating and the skill sets necessary to maintain, plan and grow as well as maintain appropriate security are becoming more and more difficult for small companies that don’t have the resources to employee multiple IT staff and keep their skills up to date.
This provides a new opportunity to review the benefits of a managed IT provider – providing a bench of skilled technology staff as well as a standardized approach to hardware, software management and security for both the endpoints and the overall company.
If you are unfamiliar with the managed IT business model, here is a quick overview: Managed IT services is a subscription based model, usually scoped around the number of devices, with pricing driven by consumption, monitoring, backups and security. This model helps in several ways, but primarily it aligns the cost structure to drive positive proactive maintenance of both infrastructure as well as planning for future growth and expansion to minimize risk. Risk management is something that every business understands. The Managed IT provider assumes and manages much of the risk for the company it serves by applying standardized methodologies to your infrastructure and software systems.
Some questions to ask yourself to determine if your company is ready for a managed IT solution:
- Do you have sufficiently trained staff or time to formally deal with proper maintenance, updates and repairs/replacement?
- Did your IT team achieve its goals last year, or were they hampered by lack of time, skills or support?
- Did your organization have too many outages or downtime?
- Did you lose data due to lack of a proper disaster recovery plan, malware or ransomware?
- Were you able to quickly pivot to a remote workforce and have the tools necessary to maintain and support that workforce?
These are all areas that a managed IT solution provider can help your business cope with the stresses and changes happening in the IT requirements due to Covid.
I recommend you reach out to your local providers and get a better understanding on how managed IT can help your business survive and thrive during these trying times.
