In the present times, businesses carry out a lot of different activities and functions for which they need constant IT support. The primary benefit of IT support is improving your company’s potential to provide excellent customer support and enjoy a competitive edge. In addition, small business IT support protects your company against downtime when IT systems cannot be used and cyberattacks without paying for an in-house IT team.
Customers have higher expectations for online experiences, requiring a more robust IT support system and infrastructure. These expectations include companies providing excellent business continuity and customer service without interruption, better data protection, and adhering to standard safety standards.
Small and big organizations with robust managed IT support will be able to concentrate on business and customer service continuity and enjoy the competitive advantage of meeting current data and compliance management expectations.
The market statistics
According to the US Small Business Administration, about 88% of small business owners have reported felt that their businesses were vulnerable to cyberattacks but didn’t have the resources or knowledge for a contingency plan. In addition, it is a misconception that cyberattacks only target big companies—71% of cyber attacks occur in organizations with fewer than 100 employees.
In 2021, 58% of America’s small businesses suffered a security or data breach, with over 40% of those affected spending $250-500k and 1-2 years on average to resolve the violation.
Enables your internal IT team to be stress-free
Small and big businesses alike use multiple software platforms to handle their operations. By hiring IT support, you’ll reap the benefits of experienced professionals knowledgeable about different platforms. Providers make it their mission to train on various available software platforms and have the know-how to troubleshoot them. Your team will no longer have to spend effort or time training others on using software platforms, interacting with platforms’ customer service, or troubleshooting bugs.
This is especially useful if your team has lost valuable working hours trying to troubleshoot a technical issue or waiting for customer service to get back to them on a topic.
For small and medium businesses, a managed IT provider can take over onboarding new employees by supplying and setting up the technical equipment they need. That way, your team can focus solely on training a new employee instead of having multiple people act as IT support. In addition, transferring onboarding responsibilities from an existing IT team at a big business to an IT provider can give the in-house team time to focus on more significant tasks.
Makes maintenance tasks super easy
Hardware and software maintenance is vital for keeping cybersecurity up-to-date in your organization. Maintenance is challenging for busy smaller organizations without IT support or big organizations with understaffed in-house IT teams. These routine tasks include:
- Updating software and patches
- Maintaining configuration standards
- Analyzing audit logs
Without proper and thorough IT maintenance, an organization’s risk of undergoing a cyberattack can increase. Let’s talk about one of the most common risks. Busy season happens, and you start ignoring any pop-up “Update software” notifications. We’ve all been there. However, these notifications are “software patches” that address known security product vulnerabilities for a product. Timely patches keep your business protected.
An on-call IT provider can keep up with the maintenance needed to ensure no patches are missed, audit logs are created and analyzed, and minor issues get addressed before they snowball into major problems.
Irrespective of the size of your company, IT support from a provider can help mitigate long-term risks and reduce operational workload so your team can focus on what they do best. At Ebullient Services, we are well-equipped to do so. Get in touch now!