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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.

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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.

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Covid has changed the way we use the Internet at home

A recent article in the NY Times, highlighted the fact that we have moved away from our phones as the primary mode of interacting with content on the internet, as we sheltered at home.  In addition, there has been a huge increase in the use of video chat, including Zoom, Google Classroom and Microsoft Teams, as we look at ways to perform the face to face interactions that we took for granted, in our day to day lives and work environments.

Working from home has changed many company’s employee interactions with high reliance on the tools that allow them to do their jobs, while still being home to take care of children who are also remotely learning.   As a Managed Service Provider, we have been hard pressed to assist our clients in expanding the availability of remote access to critical software tools, stuck at their corporate offices and co-location facilities.   Companies that readily integrated cloud services, such as Office 365, Google Suite and Egnyte have fared better and been more easily able to transition to this difficult, distributed work force.

If your company has not thought about how they are going to support their home-workers, it is a good time to evaluate the services of a good Managed Service Provider that can help you create a strategic plan to provide services, maintain and support your remote teams.   The home environment adds other security issues as well, with unknown firewalls, wifi and IOT devices with potential access to your company’s data.

If your company is in search of good advice, we’re here to help in the San Francisco Bay Area as well as the Anchorage Metro.