It’s nearing that busy time of the year. Holidays arrive, often leaving you short-staffed, while year-end reporting looms. Things can get pretty hectic! The last thing your business needs now is an IT issue. How can you keep things running smoothly in all the chaos? It might be the perfect time for you to partner with a managed IT service in the Chicago area to handle your IT needs. Let’s see how an IT solutions group can help keep your business on track.
Proactive IT Support
No one likes IT surprises, system breakdowns that affect your operations and frustrate your customers. But proactive IT support, anticipating those issues and preventing them before they happen, can keep your systems humming during a busy season. Here are some of the ways a managed IT service can provide proactive support and maximize efficiency.
- System Monitoring 24/7 – An IT managed service provider (MSP) uses monitoring tools that alert their technicians to unusual network traffic, failing hardware, and threatening security activity before your users encounter a problem.
- Regular Maintenance – Just like your car, your IT infrastructure needs regular maintenance. The professionals at an MSP will keep your software tools updated with the most recent patches and security fixes, removing vulnerabilities hackers like to exploit.
- Cybersecurity Protection – An IT solutions group can install firewalls and antivirus systems to protect your network and anti-intrusion detection systems to keep hackers from breaching security. These professionals will perform scans and threat assessments, too. Because your employees uneducated in security scams can be your biggest risk, an MSP can provide security awareness training, teaching your staff to recognize and avoid phishing scams and other threats.
- Performance Optimization – Bottlenecks in your system can create slowdowns and inefficiencies. An MSP professional can fine tune your IT infrastructure to increase speed and efficiency.
- Data Backup/Recovery – Robust data backup schedules are critical to the health of your IT system. Not only will a managed IT support team design and monitor your data backups, their consultants will help you develop a Disaster Recovery Plan to follow if a system failure happens.
- Strategic IT Planning – Of course, being proactive with your IT system means including IT in your strategic business plan. How do you begin? The consultants at an MSP can help you include a strategic IT plan that supports your business model and stays on budget.
- Training and Support – Managing efficiency means your organization has the tools it needs and knows how to use them. Along with helping you find the best applications and hardware for your business, an MSP can also provide ongoing support and training, ensuring your staff use their tools well.
By employing proactive support, a Chicago IT management services group helps you minimize system downtime, minimize long-term costs, increase your cybersecurity, and help your employees be more productive.
Business Continuity
Being proactive is great, but some issues are unpredictable. How can you keep your business running if a disaster, natural or otherwise, occurs? An MSP can help you here, too.
- Prepare – Gather the stakeholders of your company and develop a Disaster Recovery Plan. The consultants at an MSP can ensure your plan is robust and complete. They can also help you create and maintain data recovery procedures, making sure you capture all the information you need to restore your databases following a disaster.
- Prevent – Talk with an MSP consultant to install remote access and cloud implementation that would allow your employees to work remotely if a disaster occurred. An MSP will also monitor threats to your network to prevent a cyber-attack before it happens.
- Respond – Many disasters are unpredictable. So, how does your IT system recover? Talk with an MSP about implementing redundancy systems (additional IT hardware/systems) and make sure those extra systems immediately handle operations when the first system fails. Also, an MSP can ensure you have professionals who can respond to a problem 24/7.
- Recover – Your Disaster Recovery Plan outlines how to restore your data from your backups. The MSP professionals will help you make sure your backups are occurring as planned, are available when needed, and can recover your databases quickly and effectively.
Cloud Solutions
Cloud solutions are basically apps, services, or tools you access from the internet instead of your own computer or office server. They let you access things like storage, software, or processing power remotely —as long as you're online. If all or most of your software and data storage sits on an in-house server, you may find switching to cloud solutions very beneficial. Some benefits include:
- Remote Access – The ability to work from anywhere
- Scalability – Easy to add or reduce resources
- Security – Includes encryption, backup, compliance features
- Savings – Eliminates in-house costly servers; pay only for what you use
- Updates – Automatically updates apps, tools, and services
- Collaboration – Allows multiple users to collaborate in real time
Cloud solutions free you and your team from managing IT infrastructure. The licensed professionals at an MSP will not only recommend the solutions that work best for your business, they can also help you move your data and applications to the cloud.
So, whether you are looking for proactive IT support, need help developing and working a disaster recovery plan, or want to adopt cloud solutions, consider the benefits of partnering with a managed IT service. As you approach this busy season, look for a Chicago-based MSP like JMA Consulting who can maximize the efficiency of your IT system.