With a growing business, life becomes more complicated fast. It’s necessary to invest in various IT services and solutions to help manage the workflow and ease the growing pains. Not every option is worthwhile, so care must be taken to choose wisely. Otherwise, there’s a risk of adding complications rather than simplification. Here are four IT services and related solutions worth consideration.
IT Consultancy
For companies that have an incomplete technology setup, poor prior planning, and little to no oversight, it’s a struggle to know what to do first. Using the services of an IT consultancy can be useful to provide a big-picture overview. An effective consultant can lay out what they see as the best solutions relating to your company’s needs.
Implementing overly complex, ineffective solutions is costly in both time and money. Not only that, but the need to find a replacement solution later and to implement it only adds to the burden. Therefore, if your company isn’t sure how to proceed, a consultant can be beneficial.
System Process Improvements
Apps can be used to improve upon existing systems and processes. Usually, with fast-growing businesses, the systems fail to keep up. They quickly become outdated and insufficient to the task. For instance, task lists that once were fine become inadequate for tracking multiple projects with several tasks, sub-tasks, and other dependencies. Other approaches must be pursued through public SaaS apps.
For project tracking, using a SaaS app like Asana, Trello, or Friday.com allows projects and tasks to be monitored from planning and execution through to their eventual completion. Bottlenecks and other hold-ups can be readily identified and removed due to better visibility of all aspects.
Cloud Implementation
Scaling for small businesses is especially difficult and costly. Adding dedicated servers, software applications, and more requires a sizable investment. The same goes for software too. Adopting the cloud allows for better cost control while scaling up to deliver manageable outcomes. Whether this is for hardware infrastructure, web hosting, or access to cloud-based apps on virtually any device, services can adapt to current requirements.
Furthermore, expenses scale primarily only as the extra resources are needed. This is preferable compared to establishing a level of hardware and software access and underutilizing it. For smaller businesses, this contains the cost of rapid growth to avoid a cash crunch.
Disaster Recovery
Backups and the ability to recover from a technology setback are two areas that fast-growing businesses often fail to attend to until it’s too late. There’s always too much else to do. A problem might occur when the office premises are broken into over the weekend. The servers and desktop PCs are stolen, and the data is stored on them along with it. Securing new hardware is the easy part, but reconstituting the data is another matter. Backups are essential to have a fallback option whether from a break-in or an unexpected hard drive failure. Through backups, the business can survive to live another day.
For companies growing at a record clip, mistakes happen because of their operational velocity. It’s necessary to secure appropriate IT services to build towards the future while still protecting the operation.