Startups and small businesses often face a number of unique challenges including deficient funding, client dependence, insufficient staff and struggles with balancing out their desires to create top quality products and services, provide their users with the best possible experience and increase their sales margins. Growing on a shoestring budget is difficult enough and the lack of capital often results in some tough decisions when it comes to relocating the already limited funds. And the department that suffers the most is almost always the technical support.
Which begs the question, is IT support really that important for a growing business? The short answer is – yes. The long answer would require a bit more explanation, so let’s go over the most important aspects of the business that are either influenced, maintained or directly governed by the IT department and the reasons why not having one is simply a bad move for your business.
Network connectivity
The job of your IT support is to handle all the networks inside the business. Whether it’s a single connection to the internet or separate networks inside the office, the IT crew is the one responsible for setting up, maintaining and troubleshooting the network connectivity. This also includes any wireless networks you might have inside the office and their optimization so they can handle all the employees and their devices. Any connectivity error you might experience is directly handled by the IT crew, so having one at your disposal is more an issue of eventual necessity than of practicality.
Communication management
Whether small or large, all businesses communicate. And they communicate a lot, actually. Companies talk to their employees, customers, marketers, business partners, stakeholders, suppliers, etc. The means of communication between them ranges from e-mails, phone calls, meeting in person to virtual meetings and video conferences. Without a dedicated IT crew, keeping all these lines of communication active and working without any hiccups, let alone completely secured against attacks, is next to impossible.
Data availability
Besides communication, both small and large companies also handle a large amount of data on a daily basis. List of employees together with their information such as insurance and payment options, appointment schedules, orders, emails, invoices are just a tip of the iceberg. Customer data is even more massive, containing detailed information such as name, age, location, address, shopping history, personal interests and preferences and even social ID and credit card information. This is why most companies that offer IT services also offer the possibility to store and manage company data inside the cloud.
Data management and security
Managing these huge sets of data is troublesome, to say the least. You have to consider which information is accessible to your customers and which to the employees and stakeholders. Additionally, all this data needs to be securely stored and transferred via the office network. Again, the IT team is the one who manages, organizes and secures all this sensitive data. And since all the data is in the cloud, it can be accessed anytime and anywhere – by those authorized to do so.
Office infrastructure maintenance
Office infrastructure includes any cables used to connect the in-office computer, the proprietary equipment such as printers, scanners, Wi-Fi modems, and routers as well as the infrastructure supporting the communication between different departments. If anything goes wrong, you can simply call in the IT crew instead of wasting your time and the time of your employees while trying to find the adequate solution to the problem. In case your company requires IT support, the team of professionals behind Brisk Technology is more than willing to lend a helping hand and resolve any potential issues in the shortest possible amount of time.
As you can see, a professional IT support service is vital for a business during all stages of its growth. You might think that the already scarce funding can be invested in something better, but the truth is, in today’s world where all types of communication, data handling, customer support, selling and shopping for products and services are done via the internet, IT support is invaluable. You can train your employees to do virtually any job you want, but that doesn’t mean that they will be able to finish the task with the same speed and efficiency that a dedicated IT crew will.
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