How IT Managed Services Can Save Small Businesses

Scary times are upon us and the economy seems to be getting worse by the day.  Small Businesses make up the backbone of America and many owners are wondering how they will survive.  Cutting costs in every way they can and trying to plan everything can get hard and for most helps very little.  Small Business doesn’t mean the same thing that it used to; in fact many small businesses conduct their business all over the world.  Communication, computer and server function and reliability, and data disaster recovery are major factors in the success of the business world today.

Let’s talk now about IT and how people use it.  Let’s say we go and examine a small accounting firm to see what they would use as far as technology.  Well chances are you won’t walk in and see a bunch of people with adding machines and notebooks on their desk.  What you will probably see is several desktop computers, a fax machine, and a few printers right? What about what programs are on those computers, we will probably see Microsoft Office (Word, Excel, and Outlook) as well as QuickBooks and maybe some other accounting programs.  What about the company’s email, do they have their own email, or are they using a web based email client?  How are the company’s files backed up in case of a disaster recovery, if they are even backed up at all? Does the company get their email on their phones?  Does the company have their own website?  What does a company do if they have a workstation that gets a virus?  What if the employee who is currently taking care of a company’s workstations and servers is unable to repair the workstation, or they have a computer failure that causes the company to loose valuable data, and the employee just can’t recover it?  Who can they call for help?

So what does all this mean?  Well those programs need to be supported and so does what they connect to (servers, routers, and switches).  So that means that you have to have someone around to keep them running.  After all, if you lose a computer or server you might lose a lot of money also.  There are many companies that have a single employee that can take care of certain issues concerning the maintenance of individual computers, and even simple server problems.  However, this individual is very seldom a certified IT professional, and can not provide the same level of service or information that a certified IT professional is able to.  There are often times where a company is not even aware of the potential of their equipment, email, or file sharing abilities.  Or even, the security issues that unqualified personnel can create unknowingly.

Well for the past 5 or so years there has been a trend growing in the United States that is really saving SMB’s money while making them more efficient.  The term used it called Managed Services which really means Outsourced IT.  Companies such as IronTech Solutions provide companies with professional IT management, for less money than a company hiring it’s own IT department employees.

We also have to cover the companies who have no IT support and try to do it themselves.  This is very dangerous considering what was mentioned above.  To give you an example of what scenarios there are for these businesses let’s say we have a small mortgage company with an email server and a server that holds records for all of the mortgages they have given out over the years.  One night the weather gets bad and lightning hits a power transformer outside causing the server to crash.  The owner who thought he knew enough to maintain the network had never checked the backups or even tried to back any information up.  So now he calls in a company to try to recover the data on the server and get email back up, they tell him they were able to get some of the records back but all of his email is lost.  Where does he go now?  How much did he lose and how will he recover the data?  To get to the point here he probably would have to spend about 3000 dollars to recover as much of the data as he can, plus the down time while employees couldn’t work, not to mention the data he didn’t get back and now can’t.

The point here is that IT should be left to administrators who understand what needs to be done on a daily basis. Managed service companies could have prevented this disaster by having dedicated professionals that are constantly monitoring the environment for situations like this.

IronTech Solutions has the most experienced and highly trained personnel in the industry.  IronTech employs personnel that can handle any IT situation from remote care and maintenance of individual workstations and software, all the way to company network design and implementation.  Whether your company has an established IT department and is in need of consulting, or if your company is in need of IT monitoring and establishment, Irontech solutions can help your company become up to date in the technology of today, and keep your company current with software and technological advances in the future.